About Arts for Social Cohesion

Arts for Social Cohesion helps build up the health of groups, so they may navigate change, tensions and opportunities more skillfully — and be where people want to be. 

Arts SoCo’s tools are the unique capacities of the arts, together with design principles for connection across differences. 

Arts SoCo assists partners in realizing their aims — aims where quality and depth of relationships drive success. Partners range from Oxfam America and the TogetherUP Institute to Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. 

Arts SoCo is building a systematic, replicable and trainable arts-based approach to increase cohesion. To hone its methodological precision, Arts SoCo partners with rigorous researchers. Examples include Dr. Nichole Argo, social psychologist and author of the Belonging Barometer, measuring how Arts SoCo’s cohesion processes accelerate the formation of a civic hub cohort spanning political, business, faith, identity, health and social action organizations including town departments; Incevia Policy Partners, specializing in community engaged and participatory research on thriving communities, evaluating Arts SoCo cohesion processes with members of an African Methodist Episcopal church and a Reform Jewish congregation; and Dr. Sindiso Mnisi, a legal and social justice scholar studying Arts SoCo cohesion impacts on a college campus through an Ubu-Ntu framework. Such work aids Arts SoCo in developing an evidence base to increase recognition of arts-based cohesion interventions’ contributions across contexts and sectors.

Founded in 2024, Arts SoCo channels its directors’ decades of high-level artistic, pedagogical and facilitation expertise to an explicit social change mission. In Arts SoCo’s first year, Boston’s Center for Combating Antisemitism (CCA) identified Arts SoCo as one of three “high potential and high impact…strategic community-based projects well-positioned for moving the needle” toward deeper cross-community understanding [i]. Arts SoCo was the sole arts-based initiative. Independent evaluation (Incevia Policy Partners) of the CCA-funded cohesion processes shows deepened humanization and stereotype disruption between participants from the African Methodist Episcopal church and Reform Jewish temple still holding 7-8 months after Arts SoCo’s interventions.