How Creative Research Strategies Can Center Community Voices

Introduction

Decades of research suggests that engaging in the arts can benefit people of all ages. For example, arts engagement has been linked to a 48 percent lower risk of depression and a 44 percent lower risk of developing dementia among older adults in the United Kingdom. Research shows that the health benefits of engaging in the arts can be similar to those gained from regular exercise. Participating in the arts has also been shown to reduce stress and loneliness—two significant risk factors for serious conditions such as heart disease and hypertension. Timely scholarship also extends a global perspective on supporting youth mental health with arts-based strategies. Further, public health researchers cite the role of art in anti-racism efforts, community organizing, and health equity. These findings suggest that the arts may be an important community resource for health and wellbeing.

Building on this body of evidence, the national initiative One Nation/One Project (ONOP) launched its Arts for EveryBody campaign to leverage the power of the arts to support the development of healthier, more connected communities across the country. Through the initiative, eighteen sites across the United States convened local artists, community health leaders, and municipal officials to work together to imagine and create programs that could improve lives through creativity and collaboration. Central to this work was an equitable research and evaluation agenda, which was designed by ONOP’s National Research and Impact Team to center ONOP’s values—equity, accountability, (re)imagination, care, complexity, joy, and disruption—while taking on an expansive view of what constitutes data and how it can be collected.

As the National Research and Impact Team, we anchored this work in a commitment to research focused on involving the participating communities, advancing local research capacities, and ensuring that the engaged communities had a role in the research process. In acknowledgement of past and ongoing extractive research practices in the United States, ONOP aimed to make research more beneficial to communities by engaging more ethical, participatory methods. In doing so, we hoped to demonstrate how researchers can create meaningful community partnerships that provide real and immediate benefits to the communities.

The Research Question That Started It All

ONOP’s research sought to explore how arts participation can influence social cohesion and wellbeing at the community level. The research design was grounded in the We-Making Theory of Change. This framework asserts that “place-based arts and cultural strategies can contribute uniquely to building social cohesion in communities and that, in turn, social cohesion can cultivate equitable community wellbeing.” With this work as a foundation, the ONOP Research and Impact Team developed a central research question to guide our agenda: How can arts participation in communities influence social cohesion and wellbeing?

Our team sought to generate evidence that would be useful to the eighteen sites, as well as to artists, practitioners, and policymakers across the country. This paralleled a desire to be responsive to current conversations in the arts sector around impact measurement and the need for tools to strengthen the case for cross-sector investment in arts in health initiatives. In doing so, this research and impact agenda offers artists an opportunity to see themselves within the research process, and it may even inspire them to include research and evaluation as a line item in a future grant application as they seek to document and deepen their impact.

We wanted to explore a new approach and to design processes that created a value exchange rooted in an aesthetic experience and information exchange, where participation could feel inherently engaging, meaningful, and even fun.

Rethinking Research as Community Partnership

One foundation of equitable research is understanding who is meant to benefit from the research. The intended beneficiaries of ONOP’s research were prioritized as follows:

1. The eighteen ONOP communities
2. ONOP partners and investors
3. The fields or sectors involved (public health, healthcare, arts and culture, arts in health, local government, etc.)
4. United States communities and the general public

This clarity was essential for daily decision-making, including the decision to allow each ONOP community to opt in or out of participating in each phase of the research process. This decision acknowledged and respected several elements: past harms and extractive practices related to research in the communities, limited local resources such as time and technology, and varying levels of interest in research from participating ONOP communities. Communities also provided input about what types of data held meaning and how it should or shouldn’t be collected. For example, in communities where electronic surveys or QR codes seemed out of place, our team provided paper and pencil options. We also offered translations in Spanish and Mandarin and altered specific language used in surveys and reports to be more culturally relevant as requested.

Our dedication to involving communities in the research process and to providing value through the research led us to invite the first cohort of nine cities to form Community Mapmakers Groups. While the second cohort launched their projects a year later than cohort one and were therefore not expected to form Community Mapmakers Groups, we encouraged them to do so, and some did.

We chose the term "Mapmakers" because mapmakers are people who chart a place’s geography to help guide both understanding and exploration. These groups were designed to have greater agency than traditional research advisory groups, motivated by a desire to center local leadership and affirm community ownership of the research process. Mapmakers reflected the broader community while also representing specific stakeholders who could speak directly to the project’s focus and the work happening at their site. Each community brought together six to twelve members representing diverse genders, ages, cultures, races, and community roles. For example, in Gainesville, Florida, the Mapmakers Group consisted of adolescents and young adults from the community. They collaborated with the site team on co-envisioning their local project, which focused on reducing youth gun violence and promoting community healing by harnessing the power of arts and culture.

A site co-lead spoke to the power of these groups:

...in Gainesville, there is a disparity in access to services…and so that was a huge point of intentionality, like not just making sure that the program is youth focused, making sure that it's focused on the youth who are impacted. And the same with the youth steering committee...a lot of the youth who are [mapmakers] have also been directly impacted or…one removed person…I think…having that perspective is really powerful.

Every Mapmakers group received an annual budget of $10,000, which could be used in any way that would most equitably support the group. Examples of how the budget was used included member stipends, hourly pay, compensation for the local group lead, food, childcare, and transportation. Additionally, each group also had an assigned mapmakers liaison from the Research and Impact Team for support.

When we prioritize personalized engagement, meaning-making, and mutual value exchange, research participation can shift from an extractive process to a collaborative one.

Research Tools That Honor Community Experience and Uplift Arts-based Methods

Our team set out to facilitate a data collection process that could be more reciprocal and engaging for the communities. Too often, researchers are willing to collect information, knowledge, and experience from participants without offering any immediate benefit in return. We wanted to explore a new approach and to design processes that created a value exchange rooted in an aesthetic experience and information exchange, where participation could feel inherently engaging, meaningful, and even fun.

One early example of this approach took place during the initial site visits for the first cohort. At each visit, community members were guided through a sensory activity created by ONOP leaders and theatermakers Christina Eskeridge and Michael Rohd. Community members were invited to describe the sights, sounds, smells, touch, and tastes unique to their communities. The resulting sensory “data” were then shaped into poems by research and impact associate and poet Gray Davidson Carroll. Serving as unique “portraits” of each community, these poems were the first data returned to communities. These poems offered research team members—as outsiders—critical “portraits” of how the communities saw themselves.

Participatory murals were also used across multiple sites as a creative way to gather community perspectives on what the arts do in the context of their lives. More specifically, each mural panel had a prompt by which the public could respond including phrases like “the arts give...", "take...", "break...", and "create…” These re-usable panels were mobilized at public facing events to collect data and further inform the central research question.

In partnership with Stanford Arts at Stanford University, we engaged the design, production, and engineering studio Tactile Pictures to develop an “artified” surveying app that integrated visual art, storytelling, immediate return of data, and useful information to create a more immersive and reflective experience for study participants. Our team worked closely with Nizma Zaman and Derek Chung of Tactile Pictures as well as artist Sophia Rose Cruz to build a visually rich, intuitive, and accessible app for our data collection. In this intentional blending of creativity with research, we invited users into a space that encouraged not only reflection but a sense of play, while still gathering high-quality data. The app received an international juried Collision Award for its design and successfully collected over ten thousand surveys, receiving very positive feedback from users. Demographic questions on race, ethnicity, and origin; gender identity(ies); age; education; and socio-economic status were essential to interpreting survey results. Expanding the survey with inclusive categories and options for self-description or non-disclosure was intended to reduce the marginalization of undercounted and systematically excluded groups that are often “othered.” The app’s success shows how arts integration can further center the research participant experience. When we prioritize personalized engagement, meaning-making, and mutual value exchange, research participation can shift from an extractive process to a collaborative one.

The Value Exchange: What Communities Got Back

A central part of our team’s values-based approach was a commitment to returning data and findings to the site teams and community members who made the research possible in a timely manner. From the beginning, we prioritized local ownership of knowledge and set a clear goal: to return all data and findings within three months of each data collection cycle. Resources like raw de-identified data, focus group transcripts, statistical summaries, and plain-language reports written specifically for a general audience were organized in easy-to-access digital repositories and stored on a secure platform hosted by the University of Florida. Each of these communities will continue to have access to these repositories for at least four years, in addition to ongoing technical assistance. This structure was designed not only to return findings, but to make them useful. Many sites have already begun using their data to support local planning, program development, and advocacy efforts.

At the same time, we recognized the importance of contributing to the broader fields of public health, arts, and research. While peer-reviewed publications and other academic outputs were components to this work, they were not prioritized over community access. Research briefs—concise summaries of key research and impact findings written in clear, accessible language—were made publicly available on the Arts for EveryBody website throughout the duration of the project. By creating multiple ways for people to engage with the research as scholars, practitioners, policymakers, or community members, our team worked to ensure that the knowledge generated through this work remained open, relevant, and rooted in the places it came from.

Practical Takeaways

The research undertaken by ONOP on the impact of the Arts for EveryBody campaign offers a compelling model for values-based research—one that treats communities not as subjects of study, but as co-creators of knowledge. For practitioners across public health, community development, arts, and research sectors, our approach holds several key takeaways:

1. Center community voices from the start. 

   Giving communities the choice to opt-in to different stages of research, determine data collection methods, and shape the language used in tools and reports built trust and ensured relevance. This approach respects local knowledge and fosters co-creation toward more accurate, meaningful data.

2. Reimagine data collection as an aesthetic experience and value exchange. 

   Transforming data collection into an engaging, art-infused interaction reframed participation as something valuable in and of itself. This shift helped elevate the participant experience, increased response rates, and showed that research can be joyful, aesthetic, and reflective. It also highlighted the valuable role artists can play within the research process.

3. Return findings quickly—and make them useful. 

   Instead of withholding data until formal publication, ONOP committed to returning all findings to ONOP site teams and mapmakers within three months. With raw data, transcripts, and plain-language reports organized in secure digital repositories, communities had timely access to their own information, enabling them to use it for planning, advocacy, and program development.

4. Prioritize access over prestige. 

   While peer-reviewed publications are important, ONOP also wanted to prioritize community access and practical usability. Research briefs designed for general audiences were made publicly available online, expanding who could benefit from the research and ensuring it wouldn’t only live in academic journals.

5. Incorporate research into your next grant application. 

   As you consider upcoming grant applications for your artistry, consider how incorporating research into your design could support your case-making in the present and for future grants. Not only would this provide an avenue to capture the impact of your work, but it also has the potential to create stronger narratives on the ways in which your work may be affecting your community.

6. Let values shape both process and product. 

   By grounding research methods in values like equity, care, complexity, and joy, we worked to disrupt conventional power dynamics in research. This approach showed that rigorous data collection and ethical community partnership are not at odds, but in fact enhance one another.

To learn more about the Arts for EveryBody Initiative and its co-created research, head to the “Our Research” tab of the Arts for EveryBody website. There you can find our publicly available plain language research briefs, published journal articles, and more about our research and impact team.