The very word “outreach” implies that the arts organization is reaching out to the poor art-less school communities and offering something valuable for its own sake. Arnie Aprill’s article gets at this idea with the statement about changing “outreach” to “inreach”.

Instead of this “power inequality” model of “Community Outreach”, Paul Burdick suggested that we use the Artist-Teacher-Scholar model as a way of co-identifying between artists and teachers in collaborations (The artist-teacher-scholar concept is discussed at length elsewhere on the blog, so I will assume familiarity here). If I see myself as an ARTIST-teacher-scholar and my collaborator in the school sees him/her-self as an artist-TEACHER-scholar, then we can both come to the table to create a new partnership from the same self-identification.

Given this co-identification, The artist says to the teacher “I happen to be good at art, so any way I can help out with what you are doing in your teaching, I’d love to. You’re the expert at teaching, and if I could learn a few things along the way about that, that’d be great too.”

Under this new model, we see collaborations between teachers and artists as partnerships that support both folks’ goals. As Arnie Aprill suggested in his article, by bringing together diverse groups into collaboration, both can be learning and teaching at the same time.

Paul underscored repeatedly the importance of having a good collaborator in this kind of work. His own practice is to maintain contacts with good collaborators, regardless of whether or not there are shared needs at the present, and to constantly be on the lookout for new possible collaborators. It was a central theme of the course that without a collaborator that either compares or compliments in terms of enthusiasm, organization, and energy, no artistic collaboration can succeed over time. Like Aprill’s rule about “Black Hole” partners, the collaboration needs to feed both partners or it won’t succeed.

So, if we see ourselves in this way — artist-teacher-scholars looking for for collaborations with other partners to produce art-teaching-scholarship for new audiences, how does that change the lay of the land on “community outreach”? How do senior centers fall into this category? autistic folk? business leaders?

If, as Joy-Leilani and JoyBelle suggest, there are no communities who cannot benefit from our art, then for me the discussion is really about how to identify what kinds of goals I have for my artistry and where can I find arts collaborators whose goals overlap with mine.

Reading your article made me think about the time when I performed for, or rather shared my music with a retirement community a few times. It was in Tokyo, Japan, and my friend (who played the cello) and I played various songs, but it was the traditional Japanese songs that were undoubtedly and understandably the most popular amongst the crowd there. They really listened intently to us playing, and it really made me realize that musical outreach is such a powerful instrument in communication. I know that you’re looking for communities other than schools and assisted living centers, but like Joy-Leilani, I really can’t think of a community that wouldn’t benefit from musical outreach. Perhaps the congregating and assembling of bodies to listen to music together adds to the effect that a musical perfomance or sharing of music has on communities. However, musical outreach can also powerfully be administered on an individual level. It all seems to depend on context.

Have you heard of the organization Music For Autism? Their website is http://www.musicforautism.org. Incidentally, my friend Rob Accordino is one of its co-founders.

As I thought about the issues of outreach and community, and which communities typically are the recipients of outreach, I was unable to think of a community that couldn’t benefit from musical outreach. My next question was, which communities (besides those most often targeted) are most in need of outreach? I’m not sure there is any way to really determine this, at least in any formal way. For some reason Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison came to mind, and I’m sure there are other artists who have reached out to that prison communities. But whatever communities we choose to be active in, I think it is certainly important to look beyond the obvious opportunities and seek out other groups and communities that are currently being overlooked.

Anothe issue that comes to mind when discussing outreach are the many forgotten populations that do not benefit from outreach programs. A special interest of mine is Autism. Many autistic individuals respond quite well to music, but these children are not pressured to perform on standardized tests as typically developing children are. As a result, students who need to perform well on tests recieve these extra music programs while autistic individuals are left out of these services even when music may be among the few things to which they repsond.

Outreach is a complicated issue as it is also dependent on which populations are deemed worthy by funding sources. I think it would be important to begin exploring new populations for outreach intiatives (as well as inreach) and to explore what it is about these art forms that would benefit these populations specifically so that it may justify (perhaps to funding sources) why we need to reach out further to these new populations.

You might be interested in an article by Arnie Aprill, called “Rules for Arts Ed Radicals,” which is available online at http://www.capeweb.org/tprules.html, and will be reprinted in the upcoming Journal for Music-in-Education. Arnie Aprill is the Executive Director of Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) and one of the founding Site Directors of the MIE National Consortium.

In “Rules,” Aprill suggests that “power imbalances” between arts organizations and community centers have hampered the mission of arts outreach.

Aprill writes,

Rather than seeing artists as employees and teachers as clients, teachers and artists are both seen as a co-equal constituency . . . The out reach model is a scarcity model, in which art assumes its value in direct proportion to its exclusiveness, placing arts organizations in the awkward position of struggling to connect to those it has excluded. This one-directional process tends to exacerbate ethnocentric assumptions about the cultures and capacities of communities being ‘out-reached.’ As an alternative, CAPE has developed an ‘in-reach’ model, in which schools and communities curate their own exhibitions and performances in partnership with professional arts organizations, drawing directly on the resources of the arts organizations, but maintaining their own active leadership in the program design from beginning to end.

Perhaps then, the challenges faced by community outreach aren’t with the choioce of communities being served, but the way in which those communities opportunities are approached?