These are some great ideas Susan!

My husband and I were having a talk about certain Cleveland neighborhoods where crime is deleterious to community building. We began to discuss how to reweave these communities/neighborhoods. Things that came to mind were community gardens, and public art.  Two examples leapt to mind and I offer them here as food for thought to artists who may have tired of the traditional pathways that their arts educators may have presented as careers in the arts. In Philadelphia, Lily Yeh has transformed a poor neighborhood into The Village of Arts and Humanities, and in Houston, artist Rick Lowe made a neighborhood his studio. Read about it here.

CIA with its recent show Green Cleveland helps its students to begin to think about the impact arts can make more broadly and certainly Kent's School of Architecture and Environmental Design, regularly makes headway in this direction. City Music offers free concerts throughout the city and RTA has a panel of arts advisors to make transit artier. Coventry and St. Clair Superior neighborhoods have been enlivened by installations that bring life to those business districts. But art can serve a variety of needs, not just sprucing up a business district.

 
After a rousing discussion about empty lots and what might happen on them to replace drug, sex and gun dealing, we decided that meet and greets are increasingly important to the revitalization of Cleveland neighborhoods. There is a preponderance of well intentioned nonprofits whose work goes on unbeknownst to that of their colleagues. Sometimes these entities are working side by side in the same neighborhoods and have never met. How can we convene the do gooders to develop strategies for areas of the city without defensiveness and protectiveness of their funding, boards and missions? It remains to be seen in a city where the river and attitudes divide us, where controversy is the news we have become accustomed to hearing. But the Cuyahoga Valley Initiative represents a new vision for our river and valley -- one that joins rather than divides. The arts could provide more opportunity and creativity for reweaving the cultural fabric of our community, not just in University Circle (the obvious hub of cultural activity), but beyond into the very cells of this organism in which we live, the neighborhoods of the city of Cleveland.