Co-Design and the Power of Coalition

Michael Rohd, director of Co-Lab For Civic Imagination and civic collaboration director for One Nation/One Project, sat down for a conversation with Christina D. Eskridge, founder and executive director of Elevate Theatre Company and national mapmakers coordinator for One Nation/One Project. They discussed the unique ways that artist-led practice can build trust between various stakeholders—including neighbors, strangers, leaders, local organizations—and guide processes that authentically bring resident voices into local planning efforts and decision-making within community development. This exchange explores ways to define co-design by drawing on our experiences from before and after the national campaign Arts for EveryBody.

Michael Rohd: We are exploring the definitional shift, in terms of vocabulary and practice, from a “community engagement” lens to a “co-design” lens. Through this project, was there a journey around co-design, or has it been just one consistent perspective for you?

Christina D. Eskridge: My background is in healthcare consulting and theatre, and in the beginning of my career these fields were always on two parallel tracks. Neither, in my opinion, fully leveraged what I now know as co-design. In the healthcare and consulting world, where the goal is to ensure hospital efficiency, quality, and workforce engagement, co-design was more of an ideal concept rather than a consistently applied practice. The consultants did journey mapping or looked at “a day in the life” of a patient or frontline healthcare worker. We would shadow people around the hospital to learn about their experiences, but ultimately the consultants and the healthcare leaders were building the solutions, sometimes getting feedback, and perhaps applying that feedback in full. “Co-design” was not the language I used in that setting. There wasn’t necessarily a desire for back-and-forth, to be in continued dialogue, or to create a systemized iterative process.

In the theatre, in a way it’s all co-design because everyone is bringing their own skill set to the table to build something together. You can’t have a musical without singers, dancers, musicians, etc. all working together towards a common vision. But there too, there is ultimately someone making top-down decisions without much input from those on stage, unless the theatre work is devised with collective input, accountability, and shared stake in the outcomes. Generally, in commercial theatre, there is someone on the outside shaping it towards a vision that may not necessarily be a collective vision. So, originally from my theatre experiences, I think co-design to me was more a loose synonym for collaboration.

How can we co-design solutions with community members?

But in my work with Elevate, co-design began to take on a new meaning. When you commit to building a play about a specific public health topic in a particular context (that can change) in partnership with public health institutions, frontline health workers, and theatremakers, you are in a constant dialogue, and the play is constantly changing. You have to ask: Who is at the table? Who is accountable for decisions? Who has a desire to see what outcomes? How do we build something that positively impacts our community?

Michael, can you talk about your role and how you see these dynamics play out, both before and in this project?

Michael: I have two backgrounds that have engaged the idea of co-design in different ways myself. One, I'm a theatremaker. I have a longstanding practice most frequently in the ensemble context with my own company, Sojourn Theater. That's a devising and a co-creation model. We never used the word “co-design” in that context, but as a theatre artist I’ve always thought about creative collaboration as integral to the way I make work.

As my work started to engage partners and stakeholders outside of arts contexts and more in community development, public health, planning, and education, I started to explore how the arts could be used as a public engagement tool. In those sectors, folks would frequently want the arts to serve as a carrier of public engagement messaging, but I was fascinated with the potential of the arts, and theatre in particular, being a medium for listening in public engagement contexts and, ultimately, acting as a form of what I now think of as community co-design. I was observing in municipal and community development spaces a growing desire to involve residents in making decisions about their lives more than was historically the case in those fields. Before, it had just been surveys and feedback from constituents, then “leaders” making decisions.

Christina: Like I was seeing in health spaces—

Michael: Like you were seeing in health spaces!

But there's been this movement across these fields, particularly with younger people moving into these fields with more training in asset-based models of developing community visions across sectors—in other words, starting with community strengths, not deficits.

Christina: To see co-design as a new model for engagement and accountability—

Michael: Yes!

The question is being asked more and more: How can we co-design solutions with community members? And I started to believe, decades ago, that an answer to that question is the fact that many artists are deeply talented at creating equitable opportunities for public imagining. This is crucial in local civic ecosystems. When these artists, including theatre artists, co-create accountability practices through community-based local design initiatives, they can help local leaders earn and maintain constituent faith in local government, a necessary ingredient for sustainable, healthy democracy in today's deeply divided and frequently skeptical civic and public landscape. In my case, through theatre, I got really involved in that. And that's when co-design and civic imagination started to enter my vocabulary.

Christina: When did co-design start to be an important part of the One Nation/One Project story?

Michael: Early in the design of the initiative, we all agreed that we needed an accountability mechanism built in so that whatever we were doing and gathering resources for had meaning for the folks in the local places. They would have a say in determining: What were the goals going to be? What meaning were we all attempting to make together? What problems were we attempting to solve locally? What visions were we attempting to manifest?

One way we addressed this was through the use of Community Mapmakers Group. An important part of this conversation, of the “why” for ONOP as an initiative, is the fact that there are systems—healthcare systems, bureaucratic government systems—that are not designed for power sharing or collaborative decision-making.

Christina: That’s right. They’re often built on expected results and predetermined outcomes.

Michael: So, to insist on the Community Mapmakers Group and community accountability across all these layers of rigid function and deeply embedded structure… This whole project was an experiment, an intervention really, trying to figure out how to embed co-design in structures that were designed not to be co-design structures.

Christina: And where we saw success through structural changes and new mechanisms—policies written, procedures changed—there will be some lasting change.

There was an effort at a much deeper level to ensure community involvement in decision-making, clearly sharing their hopes and vision for the future.

Michael: And where we saw success based on specific personalities and relational exceptions, structures will most likely snap back.

Chrstina, can you describe what and who the Community Mapmakers Groups are and where that idea came from?

Christina: Yes, of course! Community Mapmakers is a term we started to use for a group of residents who would gather regularly and function as a team to help develop their community’s ONOP project work, ranging from research to artistic practice to the health topic important to them. This group would provide leadership, input, and accountability on all sorts of questions over a long period of time. Questions about research, language, goals, art forms, spaces…

Michael: And at each site, with your partnership and guidance, the site leaders had to ask and answer questions like: Who could and should be in the group? Who can and should we listen to? How do we recruit and gather the members of the group? How do we empower them with a real role in this complex process of an arts and health initiative? How do we make sure the project ultimately answers to them and their sense of community integrity as much as possible?

Christina: The national team started at the beginning of the process saying, “You tell us.” Especially knowing how extractive research can be, we asked things like, “Can we use this specific language? What should we do when it comes to local research engagement? Should we use surveys, paper and pencil, another method of data collection? How do we move forward?” There was an effort at a much deeper level to ensure community involvement in decision-making, clearly sharing their hopes and vision for the future.

Michael: These groups were not limited to artists or health providers. They were residents coming from a variety of backgrounds with an interest in a healthier community. Often those who were not already identified as community leaders went through a very organic leadership development process where on the other end of that experience they began to take on more leadership activity in their community than before.

Christina: We should note that not every site started with a Community Mapmakers Group, but everyone engaged the community.

Michael: It is interesting to think about the nine sites that did not have formal Community Mapmakers Groups but had informal circles of community members and allies who were involved in similar ways. When a project doesn't establish a formal accountability mechanism in a co-design process, like we did with half of our cohort through Community Mapmakers Groups, how does accountability get worked out? And what happens when an arts organization and non-arts partners collaborate for community benefit? How do they try to keep that grounded in community values and community lived experience?

One Nation/One Project demonstrates that the more we are in coalition across fields and sectors, the more we are able to take on big challenges and build our resilience alongside others.

Christina: Should we talk about how co-design played out in some of our eighteen cohort communities and across sectors, which included local municipal government, health entities, and artists?

Michael: And us, a national partner and funder.

Christina: And us, yes. 

Michael: We had several examples across our cohort of sites that had Community Mapmakers Groups engaged very early in their process of developing their One Nation/One Project event. These sites involved them in the larger process.

In some instances, the site work was centered around food justice, in some self-determination and cultural identity, in others serving the mental health needs of particular populations. And in each of these instances, those Community Mapmakers Groups spent many months in deep dialogue before artists even began any creating or producing work. They were investigating what would be meaningful local goals for the project. These groups really grounded the larger project in the actual community needs and community visions. And although they were very local and culturally, regionally specific in terms of context, these projects had some shared qualities in the thoughtfulness of the process.

Christina: I think one of the biggest learnings I had working on this project is that co-design requires trust, and therefore co-design may not be a fast process. That is not a negative. It is a part of a larger goal of the process. Although this project was temporary, truly time-bound, and that parameter created a sense of urgency, it was still important to take the time and space from the beginning to develop the foundational work of building trust.

Michael: You're describing a very important aspect of co-design work, particularly when it is project-based. Ideally the relationship and trust building lives beyond the project timeline and its outputs, so that a real co-design process involving local government, health entities, artists, and other local stakeholders is actually building relational capital that's not just transactional, but that is going to yield very important, long-term civic infrastructure. Co-design work yields relationships that have far more impact than just the particular thing they came together to accomplish.

Christina: I think that's another success we experienced. Some Community Mapmakers Groups evolved into different entities that now are being incorporated as nonprofit organizations. Individuals are facilitating groups and starting new projects. These structures and skills will live on beyond One Nation/One Project, creating lasting impact.

Michael: What we’re suggesting is that successful co-design helps pave the way for ongoing coalition, which means we can tackle big challenges together and not just in our silos and not just trapped in the rigidity of systems that may not be set up to tackle some of the specific challenges that we face in our world now.

Christina: I see how this has changed some of our civic leaders and processes, but thinking about our colleagues, the theatremakers and the nonprofit theatre ecosystem, how do you think all this applies? There is a lot going on in the federal government across all sectors. How does our sector support, engage, and work more collaboratively?

Michael: Yeah, it's interesting. Educational institutions and nonprofit theatres are undergoing their own kind of radical reconceiving of what models make sense and are viable. In addition, as we respond to everything going on in the federal landscape regarding arts funding and national support for the arts and humanities, we have an opportunity to look beyond our own sector and look outward at all the other sectors that work around what I call Civic Care. The attack on culture is intimately connected to the attack on education and public health.

Christina: Right. And together we are stronger than we are in our siloed disciplines.

Michael: In a theatre ecosystem that's struggling financially, struggling to find its relevance in relation to places and neighborhoods and communities, I think we are suggesting that it's important to look outside our own field, not just for new stories or new audiences, but for new ways to think about how theatre intersects with community challenges and aspirations.

So, if you're a theatremaker, if you're a theatre leader, if you're a theatre worker, co-design isn't just about how the rehearsal room runs or how the season gets planned. It can be about how one continues to build surprising relationships in one's community that are not solely attached to a specific production. Relationship can be attached to the role we want our arts institutions to play in a community's life. One Nation/One Project demonstrates that the more we are in coalition across fields and sectors, the more we are able to take on big challenges and build our resilience alongside others, and the greater chance our value to community and relevance are legible.

Christina: I would push us further to say the theatre, having so much creative collaboration and co-design potential already embedded in practice, can better activate creative partnerships and simultaneously improve relationships between the different disciplines in the theatre world and with external sectors and organizations. We can consider the process as equally important (or perhaps, in some cases, more important) than the product. I think, in some ways, what we're talking about, for institutions and individuals, is making opportunities to release our attachment to a product or output and recognize that a co-design process can really expand how we are impacting our communities where it matters most.

Michael: So, co-design, regardless of where you sit, is about accountability and decision making and how, ideally, residents in a place are partners in the process of designing solutions and visions for their community. Theatremakers are uniquely positioned to make a difference in this space with creativity around who and how we engage. We can slow down how we build relationships, look beyond transactional project-based engagements, and rethink structural changes as a way to create more lasting impact, inside and outside our artistic practices.

Christina: Agreed!