The Cost of Pluralism

At a time when growing social, political, and ideological divisions seem to pull our social fabric at every end, a question emerges: What future is possible at the intersection of our increasing diversity and diminishing cohesion? And how do we reach it? In conversation with this question, One Nation/One Project (ONOP) created a multi-year national arts and health initiative in which eighteen United States communities, diverse in size and geography, built collaborations across municipal, health, and arts sectors to increase community wellbeing through the arts. As an organization, ONOP was a creative attempt to hold, at once, the hyperlocal and the national, the bespoke and the collective, the distinct and the shared.

Developed by a national team of artists (many of them theatremakers) alongside researchers and leaders within the public health and municipal sectors, the project sought to support local participatory arts activities, a national research project of unprecedented scope, a national narrative change campaign, and a culminating large scale public arts event that occurred at every site on 27 July 2024. We anchored this work in responsive technical assistance to the eighteen individual sites, with a guiding throughline of building capacity, connectivity, and collective impact.

Baked into the very heart of the project was a belief that our plurality is our strength—and first and foremost, that it is possible. It’s possible for our differences to sit next to each other without subsuming one or the other. We set out to prove this idea at every turn. In selecting and supporting our eighteen sites, we sought diverse artistic forms, adaptations, and definitions. We said “yes” to the iterative and to the evolving (at times making our work, perhaps, even harder than it already was). This approach resulted in a multimodal cohort, bringing together artists and culture workers of every kind in one creative project—the weavers and mariachi singers, the skaters and muralists, the poets and the breakdancers. Our goal was to invite every artist and community to see themselves as part of a larger whole, and to express their unique creativity and place-based identities with vibrancy and without compromise.

They found success not through a complete ignorance of their distinctions, but through an intentional commitment to always finding the common edge.

Forging Unlikely Allyship

All together, the national cohort was composed of towns, cities, and counties ranging from populations of 600 to over 2 million people—from the Chinatown-International District of Seattle to the Arkansas Delta, from the Rio Grande Valley to the Northwoods of Wisconsin, all the way to the islands of Hawai‘i. In addition to this national bridge building, we were also inviting each community to conceive of local partnership in a new way—to look out at the local landscape and imagine collaborations where they maybe hadn’t seen them before. To look at city officials and see fellow dramaturgs or co-designers, look at a community health center and see a center for artistic creation, to look at their library and see a new cultural hub for organizing. Ultimately, to explore the power and potential of what Honolulu cohort member Maile Meyer would call unlikely allyship.

This coalition of unlikely allies was in many ways our first response to the question of how to build a pluralistic network. We created a community of practice for artists and local leaders seeking to intentionally collaborate with partners they may have otherwise never engaged. What emerged in the process was an exploration of the new pathways, muscles, and skillsets needed to build stronger communities capable of holding the weight of our growing complexities and emerging challenges. This essay seeks to uplift a few of those learnings and the strategies that guided them along the way.

A Broader Coalition

Each site began their projects by identifying a shared health issue of focus. For the site team leads of Phillips County, Arkansas, a community backdropped by a distinct history of racial violence, environmental trauma, and some of the highest health disparities in the country, a key strategy was put forth to accomplish this task: identify what the widest group of people could agree upon. For the team members—and residents—of Phillips County, it was the dire need for clean water. A campaign for clean water access became, as cohort member Andrea Gluckman puts it, a “Trojan horse” for getting a historically divided community to collaborate together for positive change. This selection of a fairly broad, highly visible, and largely inarguable message was a strategic way of circumventing traditional traps that could have resulted in early dissolution of the project.

Uniquely, in the Phillips County site, three distinct projects were developed as a part of their 27 July activity, each embodying a different creative strategy for clean water advocacy in the community: an arts and health festival on the County Court House Square, a gospel choir concert and fish fry on the banks of the Mississippi River, and a sound/water caravan through the byways of the Arkansas Delta. While the three teams may not have landed on the same approaches for how to achieve a shared goal, they were fundamentally united by a march in the same direction, thus illustrating: where singular modes of collaboration prove less tenable, coordinated parallel action as partnership can be just as powerful.

They can also yield more surprising ends. An additional impact of this unique project modality was the project’s reach to multiple corners of the community, sowing seeds for new, ongoing coalitions—stronger partnerships between local nonprofit organizations and County leaders, a strengthened network of regional Black churches and water justice working groups.

Within this formation, ONOP represented an external container for the time-based partnership, providing an accountable structure and support system for the three projects. (This time-bound nature was an intentional aspect across the national cohort, providing new and burgeoning collaborations with a specific test period for their work together.) We also represented a connection to a larger network that could steep the local activity in the energy and new ideas of an even broader coalition, while still supporting the necessary working siloes that allowed each team to fully commit to their own artistic and cultural languages.

In a team representing some of the most complex historical challenges, cohesion often required a stealth and nuanced navigation around their starkest points of difference. As such, they found success not through a complete ignorance of their distinctions, but through an intentional commitment to always finding the common edge.

When we imagine the shape of our division, we often forget to consider the obstacle of the physical space(s) between us.

Reimagining Our Spaces

In other sites, as in many communities today, social isolation and its perilous effect on mental health represented a different type of divide, particularly in rural communities and among youth. In Rhinelander, Wisconsin, following the death of a local young person due to mental health challenges, local teenagers (a group of skaters organized by the name Over It!) approached the city with a vision for a community skatepark that would provide youth an essential space to gather, connect, and be expressive. In partnership with local arts nonprofit ArtStart, their vision quickly expanded to tackle the larger issue of social isolation, recognizing that other groups in the small town, such as elders, faced similar threats. This realization prompted youth and the team leaders to imagine the skatepark as a broader community space for connection, engagement, and belonging, and led to creative intergenerational projects within the community. In the lead up to 27 July, local artists led printmaking workshops and interviewed students and community members across the town. Conversation recordings were later incorporated into a culminating public sculpture and sound installation presented on 27 July alongside a local march, community meal, and a host of public performances.

Whereas in Phillips County the need was stark and widely apparent, in Rhinelander local artists and youth worked to make visible a critically overlooked need within the community and to connect a singular group’s concern to that of the larger whole. As a result, the project effectively created an arts-based narrative campaign that invited an entire town to rally around an often stigmatized issue, using public space itself as its focal point and central thrust.

When we imagine the shape of our division, we often forget to consider the obstacle of the physical space(s) between us—and the potential that lies therein. Artists, creatives, and those on the cultural margins are commonly the first to see the need and uniquely positioned to envision dynamic third spaces that invite community to come together in new ways. In Rhinelander, the local call for the skatepark has become more than a cultural expansion. It’s become a beacon of a community’s commitment to center its shared vulnerabilities and transform collective attention into communal strength. Their example reminds us that in the work to resolve disconnection, sometimes we have to first create the space that can contain our complexity—and then collectively fill it.

Building Trust Through Consistent Encounter

Over 1,200 miles away, in Providence, Rhode Island, a local team set out to tackle a similar challenge using a different approach. Local artists, residents, and staff of Providence Housing Authority (PHA), alongside city leaders at the Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism (ACT) and the Department of Health and Human Services, came together to pilot an artist residency in two public housing communities designed to promote connection and healing in the wake of the COVID pandemic. The program was marked by regular arts engagement facilitated by two local Providence artists at the two selected PHA housing sites—one a seniors-only community, the other a community for families. In partnership with the residents, the artist co-designed a final artistic project premiered on 27 July at both housing sites. In Chad Brown, the residents premiered a youth parade, meal, and outdoor music and theatrical performance; In Carroll Towers, they unveiled a community mural alongside a day of performances, workshops, and domino tournaments.

The project sought not only to strengthen bonds within the community, but also to build greater working trust between residents and city leaders. An advisory group of PHA residents met regularly and consistently with project managers and directors from PHA, ACT, and the Department of Health and Human Services to determine the goals, process, and desired artistic outcomes. These meetings often included artistic practice, with city and PHA leaders attending classes and workshops alongside residents. The project also supported and resourced the residents’ individual artistic vision, resulting in dance, visual arts, poetry, and fashion showcases featuring PHA and city staff (the fashion show was later epically restaged in Providence’s City Hall). The invitation of the local project created an environment in which creative community gathering became regular practice, paving the way for critical dialogue and knowing to be exchanged and genuine relationships to be formed. Simply put, they created community by creating together. This practice was carried over into the community-wide events of 27 July, in which the larger Providence community and invited local elected officials were able to participate in arts workshops and creative experience together.

As a result of this work, residents have shared experiencing a renewed joy for life, deepened connection, and improved holistic wellbeing. Within the municipality, partners at ACT and PHA have seen the benefit of the cross-sector work as well, as they continue to find new ways to work together and to support additional artist residencies in the housing communities. The Providence project illustrates what’s possible at the site of consistent creative gathering—not downtown, not in the theatre, but in and around the spaces we call home. These gatherings of unexpected collaborators enabled a corner of a community to come together to reimagine how their city not only looks and feels, but how it functions, how “centers” might be shifted, and how underheard voices are amplified.

Notably, across the national cohort (and particularly in Providence), artists were often engaged not only as the leading practitioners, but as the project managers as well. They were the critical liaisons between the various project partners, advocating both for the needs of the artist, for the structures of the municipality, and for the wellbeing and vision of the community. Cross-sector endeavors form networks that by their nature are multilingual. And those ecosystems need translators—individuals who can understand the distinct needs, perspectives, and priorities of those around the table and help tend to the gaps. Artists, in this way, can become essential resources to sustaining multiplicity not simply as cultural producers but as trust builders, navigating us towards unseen connection.

Towards Plurality

The plural challenges singular dominance. It makes space for new narratives and new ways of working. But the plural also magnifies differences, multiplies our borders, and increases our complexities. The plural is a network in motion. Variations without displacement. Because of this, plurality demands a higher tolerance for discomfort, frustration, and friction. It demands abundant mentalities and pliable models. These are a few of the costs we’ve observed to affording a collective identity made stronger by plurality, abundance, and belonging, as opposed to being weakened by competition, fear, and scarcity. Here are a few of the accompanying strategies:

• Find your common denominator.
• Center your vulnerabilities.
• Practice gathering.
• Tend to the gaps.
• Resource your translators.
• Energize your trust builders.
• Normalize the unlikely.
• Hold fast to the joy.

ONOP, at its core, was a community of practitioners committing to big, new ideas around the present and future of arts and health in our communities. As a result, a new network of leaders was formed, modeling the value of experimentation, the vibrancy of innovation, and the kind of resilience that is needed now more than ever.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World

There was a moment on 7 February 2025 at our Capstone Convening’s closing concert where a Panamanian-led, Latine rock band took the stage alongside a gospel duo from the Arkansas Delta (a Phillips County elder and her grandson) and a young, first-generation Senegalese singer-songwriter from the South Side of Chicago. And the audience: young breakdancers and elders from Hawai‘i, theatre artists from Appalachia and the Rio Grande Valley, hip hop heads from Washington, DC and Oakland—the muralists, the weavers, the poets, the skaters—all jumping up and down, rocking out to the most amazing cover of Tears for Fears’s “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” you’ll ever hear. Ask anyone who was there, and they’ll likely tell you it was indescribable. Or pure magic. Without a doubt, it was certainly, for this essay’s authors, one of the most blissfully random, outrageously joyful, utterly cohesive, and defiantly pluralistic moments we’ve ever experienced.

Yes, there’s a cost to upholding our complexities. But moments like that, and the potential they carry, are the reward.