Accelerating the strong relationships enabling groups to better navigate change, tensions and opportunities
We partner with humanitarian, campus, healthcare, neighborhood and faith groups.
We integrate the distinct advantages of the arts with design principles for connection across differences.
To increase collaboration, a board or leadership team invests in trainings and communication technology. Yet often members hold back from voicing their opinions, unsure whether they’ll be acknowledged. They hardly know one another beyond titles and expertise.
Inspired to launch a mutual aid group, neighbors flyer each house on three streets. But only a handful attend the meetings. Most neighbors don’t know the people behind most doors.
To retain exhausted volunteers, a
church sponsors a volunteer appreciation brunch, an easier digital calendar system, and video spots about how important volunteers are. Yet many volunteers feel they have little say about decisions, and that they don’t really know many in the community beyond being co-congregants.
In each case, the changes are likely limited and short-lived.(i)
That’s because many complexities groups face emerge from two linked domains: relationships and structures (ii).
Durable change = relationships + structure
How we contribute:
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Cohesion Campaigns
Cohesion campaigns tackle complex group challenges by addressing relationships and structures, in partnership, through a sequence of carefully planned actions.
Cohesion campaigns address a partner’s aim — from sustaining members’ engagement, increasing collaboration or undertaking bold initiatives to navigating change and conflict.
Cohesion campaigns pursue the aim by addressing the relationships and structures underlying the issue.
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Trainings
Arts SoCo is building a systematic, replicable and trainable arts-based approach to increase cohesion.
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Original productions
Arts SoCo produces live, original multidisciplinary performances. Through powerful spoken word, score and song, Arts SoCo’s performances explore real-world choices people make in times of personal or societal change, and especially unexpected grace amidst upheaval.
i. For how improving situations or building skills without addressing subjective meanings tends to produce limited, short-lived results, see for example Menec, V. H., Perry, R. P., Struthers, C. W., Schonwetter, D. J., Hechter, F. J., & Eichholz, B. L. (1994). Assisting at-risk college students with attributional retraining and effective teaching. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24(8), 675–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1994.tb00607.x; Bandura, A., & Schunk, D. H. (1981). Cultivating competence, self-efficacy, and intrinsic interest through proximal self-motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(3), 586–598. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.41.3.586
ii. For mutual dependence of psychological and structural conditions, see for example Walton, G. M., & Wilson, T. D. (2018). Wise interventions: Psychological remedies for social and personal problems. Psychological Review, 125(5), 617–655. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000115 — p. 618.For the interplay of relationships and institutions at neighborhood level, see Kaplan, S. D. (2023). Fragile neighborhoods: Repairing American society, one zip code at a time. Little, Brown Spark.