Mark Stern introduces SIAP and its community well-being framework

Thank you.

My name is Mark Stern.

I'm a professor.

Professor, is it on?

Nope.

Okay.

I'm still Mark Stern, and I'm a professor of social policy and history at the University of Pennsylvania.

My name's Susan Seifert.

I'm a colleague of Mark, a city planner and social urban community research.

Good afternoon.

My colleague Susan Seifert and I founded Penn's Social Impact of the Arts Project in 1994 to analyze culture's contribution to community well-being in Philadelphia and other cities.

We're completing our second study of New York currently.

We'd like to summarize some of our findings and their implications.

Much of the discussion of culture in the United States now focuses on its economic impact.

By contrast, SIAP, Social Impact of the Arts Project, our value proposition sees cultural opportunities as an important aspect of community well-being

and as a contributor to other dimensions of well-being, including health, educational opportunities, and social connection, especially in lower-income neighborhoods.

In lower and moderate income neighborhoods, cultural engagement is a form of civic engagement.

In many of these neighborhoods, what SIAP calls civic clusters, intentional social action by residents and local organizations allows otherwise disadvantaged communities to enjoy more cultural

engagement than their economic standing would lead us to expect.

Over the past four years, we've accumulated a lot of data on more than 5,000 nonprofit cultural providers,

15,000 for-profit cultural businesses, over a million cultural participant households, and data on 11 other dimensions of community well-being to look at the connection with the arts.

To document existing cultural assets and measures community well-being for every New York neighborhood and examine how they influence each other.