A community is more than a neighborhood. It feels like safety to show up as you are, trusting people around you to support and uplift, not judge and condemn. It’s about collectivization and meeting people where they’re at and understanding how we all are interconnected. 

The arts are a longstanding catalyst for community building. Drawing from social-music traditions of many cultures, artist salons, and creative accountability partners, it’s a classic way to connect with yourself more deeply and to others around you. Finding space for these connections to be made has been more and more difficult in the past few decades, particularly in towns and cities outside of the metropolitan arts centers. 

In this month's edition of Art Grove Newsletter, we caught up with Eliza Lamb, Ed.D, of Hopewell Virginia's Lamb Center for Arts and Healing and Stacy Busch of Kansas City's No Divide KC to discuss their perspectives on community cultivation through art-making and what it means to act guided by your mission, vision, and values. 

Dr. Eliza Lamb: Founder and Executive Director of the Lamb Center for Arts and Healing

⚲ Hopewell, VA

Mission: “The Lamb Center for Arts and Healing (Lamb Arts) is dedicated to helping underserved communities thrive through accessible, high-quality arts programming and mind, body, spirit healing opportunities.”

Eliza Lamb, Ed.D. is most accurately described as a force of nature and art. Her passion for arts access and talent for research have led her organization to create innovative arts programming specific to people who are often excluded from traditional art spaces. Her strategy is simple: rectify lapses in access to excellent arts programming by focusing the organization’s time and energy on community areas that have been passed over. 

“If there’s not a high need we do not need to be there,” Eliza said. 

But quality is a factor too, and with her background as a curator and artist herself, Eliza chooses to engage communities of all kinds with deeply considered programming. 

“Oftentimes in underserved communities, people will bring programming but it can feel like an afterthought,” Eliza said. 

Enacting a mission is hard enough, but developing the right one can make all the difference into the efficacy of those actions. When drafting a mission statement, Eliza recommended breaking it down to the simplest level: what are your values as an artist or organization? Eliza emphasized that devising a mission statement is as much about what principles you choose to include as it is what you choose to leave out. 

Starting from a personal passion is not an alien concept to artists, but putting it into words can be if your chosen practice is not writing. Mission statements can and should be revised and developed over time. Eliza explained that 18 months after the creation of the initial mission statement, she went back to her board and they decided to make a change: to refine what kind of communities they’d work in by adding the word “underserved” to the mix. This enabled the organization to further devote themselves specifically to those who needed their programming most and has become a cornerstone of what Lamb Arts stands for. 

So the bar is set, the mission statement is written. Now what? 

Eliza set out to assess the community in an effort to further understand and engage with their needs and personally extend the invitation to Lamb Arts programs. She showed up to a wide variety of community happenings from farmers markets to housing authority events with her tent and table in tow to offer free arts activities and raffles and share a simple message with community members:

“The arts are for you and Lamb Arts is your organization” Eliza said. 

In the first year of the Lamb Center for Arts and Healing, they served 2800 community members with a 3-person team through this method. Through these experiences, Eliza took note that “Offering the class is not enough, you have to invite the community in.”

As Lamb Arts’ staff and programming grows, now a 2-person staff, Eliza practices being mindful of the energy and time she has to put into projects. 

“Just because there are more hours in the day doesn’t mean I have the emotional, physical or spiritual energy to do more work,” Eliza said. 

Acting with passion and community-minded strategies, Lamb Arts walks the walk of empowering artists in Hopewell. With Eliza Lamb’s vision and the guidance of a strong mission, more and more folks have access to relevant, engaging arts programming. 

To learn more about The Lamb Center for Arts and Healing please visit their website. 

Stacy Busch: Executive Director and Co-Founder of No Divide KC

⚲ Kansas City, MO

Mission: No Divide KC uses the arts as a vehicle for stimulating social awareness, participation, and community building. No Divide KC partners with Kansas City-based artists and organizations to create artistic events that are focused on the stories of underserved and misrepresented communities in Kansas City, Missouri.

Stacy Busch is an inventive arts leader and composer who recognizes the immense power of local art-making and works to change unfair policies and practices within the arts industry. She recognized the importance of safe spaces for artists, particularly those in the LGBTQIA+ population, and worked to make that space in Kansas City. Joining forces with co-founder Emily Spradling, No Divide KC was born with the intention of creating a celebratory community sanctuary. 

“My life was saved by community spaces,” Stacy said. 

The arts as an industry is famous for opposition and competition. No Divide KC works against that, through its active collaborations, strong community based leadership, and a culture of celebration in place of competition. No Divide KC is also committed to working across different artistic disciplines, serving their community as they are, and making space for artists to explore in a nurturing environment.

“Redefining what artistic excellence is, is another way we can actually appreciate and understand what art should be in our lives,” Stacy said.

No Divide KC doesn’t stop there when tackling pervasive industry issues on the local level. They set an example for all arts organizations through their prioritization of fee-free submissions –– a practice not widely accepted across the industry at this point. 

“I’m a real stickler about calling something an artist opportunity if it’s funded by the artists it’s supposed to serve,” Stacy said. 

Ditching the submission fees lowers the barrier of entry to artists of any background to engage with the opportunity while also giving No Divide KC a further reach into their artistic community. 

Another supportive financial practice is their artist payment policy. Since the beginning of the organization, No Divide KC has always paid its artists. 

For as long as we can remember, the somewhat folkloric artist’s path to “making it” in the United States has begun and ended with the metropolitan hubs: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and Boston for instance. It’s pitched to artists as a way to flee their hometowns in pursuit of being somewhere with supposedly more abundant opportunities. There’s a new movement emerging to address this classic artists’ woe: investing in your local communities to create spaces and more opportunities for yourself and other artists.

Stacy saw this issue in Kansas City from the angle of academia. She recognized that local higher education institutions tended to isolate the students from the community in which they attended school. There weren’t many opportunities to connect with Kansas City and to be a part of the arts scene locally. Stacy recalled this sense that you’d come to this community, get all that you could out of your education, and then leave Kansas City for a land of opportunities somewhere else. 

So Stacy decided to stay in Kansas City, to experiment with what it would be like for her career as a composer to dedicate herself to local opportunities and to work toward creating more arts engagement in her community through No Divide KC. This choice allowed her to explore other sides of the arts industry as No Divide KC grew and grew. Through connections with local business leaders, her eyes were opened to a new way of understanding what she and No Divide KC were capable of.

“I realized I wasn’t thinking big enough, [entrepreneurial leaders] were able to see something larger that I hadn’t considered,” Stacy said. 

Through dedicated, mission-driven work, reflection on processes and industry issues, and a passionate local focus, Stacy and No Divide KC are leading the way for a new kind of socially aware community art-making. 

To learn more about No Divide KC please visit their website.

To learn more about Stacy Busch’s work please visit her website.