ART, SOCIAL CHANGE &
ENGAGING IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES
October 14, 2010

Transcription of Panel Contributions by
Iris Morales, Executive Director, Union Square Awards

Please note that each excerpt is framed by the question it in reference to. 

Presentation by Iris Morales:

Good evening everybody and I want to thank NYFA as well as these distinguished panelists and artists. I joined this conversation from multiple perspectives as a community activist, as an artist, and as a first-generation Latina, although I am here tonight primarily in my funder’s role as the director of the Union Square Awards. My comments will focus on grantmaking to arts organizations as opposed to individual artists and specifically to arts organizations working with immigrant communities.

By way of background, the Union Square Awards started in 1998 to support social justice organizations in New York City. About 5 years ago, we began an arts project recognizing the special role of arts organizations in promoting social justice. We’ve supported close to 200 organizations since the organization began and have distributed about $15 million.

When I first started doing site visits in immigrant communities more than 12 years ago, I found a continuum of grassroots organizations engaging in the arts. I quickly learned that arts projects were created either hand in hand or shortly after an English as a Second Language program. Of course, the first inclination of new immigrants is to preserve the rich cultural traditions of the home country and educate their children about them. Music and dance programs unite families and build community among immigrants, breaking the isolation and the loneliness that comes with being uprooted from home. Immigrants also direct artistic expression to other objectives such as interpreting the new culture and exposing the challenges of living in a new country; documenting the push and pull of migration realities; and producing artistic projects that combine the familiar with the new.

The Arts Awards has funded organizations along this range in all disciplines and forms. These Awards also bring special attention to what I call the intersection of arts and social justice. This is a dynamic sector that is not easily quantifiable and that is changing, although it has distinct characteristics for organizations engaging in immigrant communities, which I hope we’ll get into in the moderated discussion. From this arts and social justice intersection, organizations use the arts to inform, educate in discourse about contemporary issues, and mobilize immigrants as the projects that you have seen here. From our perspective, they bring tremendous energy and vibrancy to our city, they spark imagination, and they inspire action towards a human rights vision.

Maria Rosario Jackson: What does it take to do the work? What kinds of collaboration do you rely on? What are some of the challenges that you face in doing the kind of work that you do no doubt with partners you have to enlist and maybe even convince.

Iris Morales: Collaboration is a key aspect of all the organizations the Union Square Awards work with. Since the organizations are responding to a community need, it's really tied to the need in terms of what the collaborations look like. We have arts organizations that work with social justice organizations; we have arts organizations that collaborate with other arts organizations; we have writing organizations that collaborate with performing arts organizations; and we have organizations collaborating with social service providers and refugee organizations. We also have organizations that collaborate with educational institutions and with government.

What happens if you have a dance organization in a particular refugee community and the parents of the children start to come to you and say: “please help me with an immigration application” or other wider social concerns. Then all of a sudden, you just want to be a dancer but you are faced with a community you wish to be more responsive and accountable to. So you have to collaborate and many of these collaborations then come from bringing together the expertise to address specific community needs.

Maria Rosario Jackson: One of the challenges is that there are different interpretations of what success looks like and raises different expectations. What does accomplishment look like to you and how can you blend all these different expectations that people have for any given project to be delivered?

Iris Morales: The Union Square Awards does not look at impact in terms of quantifying evaluation. We look at evaluation more in terms of setting certain goals that you want your organization to accomplish. Our organizations that work at this intersection have a very specific commitment to art that has a change strategy. That means changing policy.

For example, one of the big campaigns that intersect for both our arts and social justice groups is the issue of immigration reform. Organizations will collaborate in this arena and go to Washington DC or Albany together. And how we assess them is if they are raising the issue or educating the communities of what the issues are. How nuanced is the conversation?

Recently, we had many groups working on the Dream Act. Unfortunately, this act did not proceed, but we understand that, as far as doing change work, it takes a longer time. What Carlos was saying in terms of engaging community stems from his commitment as an individual artist. But the commitment of so many of these organizations is that your relationship to the community has to be an ongoing and sustained one. You cannot exist as an arts organization with a commitment to social justice without being tied to your community. I think this is also an old way of thinking.

I was recently reading about the change occurring in the arts from a corporate or business model and everyone is recognizing that these hierarchies do not work and that we need to move beyond this to what they call the Web 2.0. In this way, we are moving towards a new direction that talks about participation and values everyone’s opinion with communities moving to make change together as opposed to having some force coming in to dictate what should be happening or measuring it with measurements that don’t mean a whole lot at the end of the day. I know that funders ask for it, but we don’t look at it that way.

Maria Rosario Jackson: As we think more proactively about artists doing work in a way that is integrated with other things that are important in this society; what does it take to have a more fluid integration of artists into communities and social change strategies?

Iris Morales: We work with both arts and social justice groups. Early on, arts organizations that work at this intersection were coming to us saying, "we have difficulty getting funding because we are not considered artists since we are doing social justice work," and, on the other hand, "we are not considered social justice activists because we are doing art." I think that this issue of creating a space is very important and is something that we have been trying to highlight so that there is a relationship and it’s recognized as an area that we can bring resources to; that’s partially what we are trying to do.

Maria Rosario Jackson: Reflecting on the projects that you've shared with us this evening, what advice would you give to people trying to do something similar at this intersection of art, social justice, and engaging with immigrant communities? Iris, what would you say from a funder's perspective?

Iris Morales: They need to bring the representation from both communities into the room. In this case, social justice workers and artists. It’s an artificial distinction that I’m making because the artists at this table probably consider themselves as social justice activists. And maybe the social justice activists don’t see themselves as artists. Certainly artists engaged in social justice also consider themselves activists.
 
I would then say, as a beginning point, that we need to bring both groups to the table and have a conversation about what this should look like and what the realities are in terms of funding for the arts and social justice organizations because I find that the support for the arts organizations is even more problematic than those in social justice, which I was surprised about. I think that society values art so little and the cutbacks have been happening for decades now.

On the positive side, I think that we are at a great moment of integrating all of these things because linear thinking has not helped us. Urban planners want to talk to artists, funders want to talk to artists, and artists want to talk to other artists and social justice activists. We all want to move away from what we intuitively feel is not working. So I think that there is an openness right now that would allow us to do that.

I recently had what I thought was a great victory. I had been trying to convince a social justice funders’ collaborative we’ve been working with to support some arts organizations and they have been rather reluctant. But I’ve had individual successes and there is one organization in particular that is working with refugee children, which is run by a dancer and it’s really a dance program. Yet she has had to deal with families and real life issues beyond this artistic realm. So I asked a major funder to see this dance program, which can really be viewed as a form of community work. The foundation head went out to visit and she said that it was the best visit that she ever had and she funded the program as a result. I thought that this was a beginning to try to open up the conversation. So I would say the next step would be to bring the people and then show an example.

Questions from the Audience:

What is your responsibility to the individual people who are participating; the people in the community on the receiving end?

I think it depends on a particular project and art form. There have been projects in which they use theater to teach English, for example, and there is something quantifiable at the end of that in terms of the number of people taught. Then there are other projects that are more challenging in terms of how you measure personal transformation. I'm not sure that I would say whether it did or didn't; but I would say that there is this moment and maybe in another moment there is something that happens in the course of acting that does kick in.

We are now funding a project that does people’s theater and they talk about the personal transformation of people that come in who are shy to begin with, but in the end are emboldened. So their whole approach is to embolden people individually so that they can deal with their lives outside. How do we measure that? I don’t think we have the tools to do that.

Mariko Masaoka-Drew: Can you comment on creating an alternative culture that is sustainable and functions alongside everyday life?

I think that many of the organizations that we’re talking about have created some sort of an alternative; although I have a bit of a problem with that word, it’s something very primary. What I was talking about with the immigrant coming and setting up spaces to preserve culture, music, dance--all of these are creations coming from the communities themselves. I don’t know if you would call them alternative, but they become part of people’s lives.

You take your children on Saturday to engage in these other cultural forms; to engage with other immigrants to learn about what’s happening with the big issues that impact you: worker’s rights, HIV, or get health information. To me, those are alternatives--although I hesitate with the word—or options that people create in their daily lives because they are not there.

You can also think about alternatives as creating something that is a hybrid. Something that we invent and maybe has another set of rules, another set of principles. That to me is something different.

Andreia Davies: Do you feel that this topic is an upcoming topic? Do you see the opportunity for changes as we discussed, for spaces, opportunities to be created, for intersections to come about?

The Union Square Awards is committed to it and we’re going to work to make it happen. I think it’s manifesting on the ground. I think that it’s showing in the work of the Laundromat Project, Domestic Workers’ United, Art for Change; it’s showing on the ground. Often issues start out at this level and then 10 years later everyone says, “Why was that an issue?”

I think this is the moment that is the hard moment; but it’s the moment when we commit to it. So as a funder, we try to be supportive of the organizations that are crossing over; creating bridges; and reaching out all at the same time.

Closing Remarks

This is an opportune moment to try and give some definition and shape to what we have been talking about. I am very pleased to have participated tonight and have this kind of conversation. I am also glad to see that NYFA is interested in it because it affects immigrants, but I think we are talking about some very big issues that have larger scale impact on how we think of artists and the role of artists in society.