Resources

On Friday January 19, 2024 we organized IMPACT: CREATING HOPE TOGETHER During a period when people worldwide were grappling with instability and oppression, we provided an online space to connect, share, learn, and discover hope and creative inspiration together

Acting Together on the World Stage is a multi-media educational initiative intended to document and strengthen the contributions of performance and ritual to social justice and conflict transformation. From 2005 – 2011, a geographically diverse team of artists, researchers and conflict transformation scholars/practitioners convened on several occasions and produced a two-volume anthology, a feature-length documentary, and a toolkit of short videos and print teaching resources. IMPACT as an idea emerged from the Acting Together initiative.

A global research initiative supported by the Community Arts Network of the Porticus Foundation. Based on analyses of the alignment between aesthetic practices and complexity/systems theory, this report offers a nuanced case for;

1) an increase in resources made available to the arts, culture and conflict transformation ecosystem.

2) a stronger alignment between philanthropic practices (selection of grantees, delivery of support,  and documentation, monitoring and evaluation, etc.) and the realities of the complex systems that characterize intractable conflicts.

IMPACT has been building partnerships with international colleagues to increase awareness of the value of arts and culture for conflict transformation among policymakers and funders. In 2020, IMPACT, together with colleagues from the British Council, Prince Claus Fund, and Porticus Community Arts Lab co-developed a  theory of change for advocacy in the ACCT field.

Following the Imagining Together/Acting Together virtual Learning Exchange in April 2020, IMPACT coordinated a participatory, multi-stage process of summarizing the Learning Exchange. Each of fourteen discussion boards (seven in English, seven in Spanish) were summarized by a diverse group from Argentina, Iran, New Zealand, Serbia, Switzerland, and the USA. The authors of the English and Spanish summaries on the same topics compared their summaries. After that, the group met together to reflect on the experience and to think together creatively about possible report(s) that can come out of the summaries and in which media formats they might be shared.

Imagine IMPACT: An emerging strategy to strengthen the arts, culture and conflict transformation ecosystem is a public-facing report making the case for the power of arts and culture to transform conflcit. It summarizes the learning from IMPACT’s exchanges from hundreds of artists, peacebuilders, scholars, funders, policymakers, and others about the strengths and needs of the ACCT field and the challenges it faces, defines key underlying concepts and details the thinking behind the ‘active experiments’ of IMPACT teams and the Leadership Circle active until 2022.

Download Imagine IMPACT Report Overview in: 

Arabic | French  | Russian | Spanish

Recognizing the importance of the voice and leadership of young people, one IMPACT working group facilitated a collaborative space for youth to design strategies to support young people in the arts, culture, and conflict transformation (ACCT) ecosystem.

Drawing on human-centered design techniques, a youth-focused design lab in November and December 2018 engaged young people around the world in assessing the particular strengths and needs of young people in the ACCT ecosystem. Then, through a “Creativity, Arts, and Social Transformation” (CAST) course at Brandeis University, students developed strategies IMPACT could adopt in order to leverage these strengths and address the needs articulated by young people.

“The Arts, Culture and Conflict Transformation Ecosystem: Summarizing IMPACT  Research through an Emerging Story”