Announcing the Community Engagement Grant Award
The Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme and the College of Arts and Sciences’ Office of Engagement are proud to announce the recipient of their collaborative community engagement grant competition.
This competition, centered around the theme of Care | Culture | Justice, supports public-facing, community-partner-engaged work that reflects on how care and caring relations operate in local and global contexts. The initiative provides substantial, strategic investment for two years to seed projects committed to strengthening the university’s capacity for transformative, community-engaged partnerships that emphasize cross-disciplinarity and integrate arts and humanities orientations, methods and practices.
The selected project, “Care, Culture and Justice as Practice: Authentic Collaborative Community Engagement,” is an exciting and robust series of exhibitions, conferences, archival projects and community-engaged programs that engage Care | Culture | Justice in vibrant and meaningful ways. Partners include the Greater Columbus Arts Council, Maroon Arts Group, Urban Arts Space, Arts Impact Middle School, Hale Black Cultural Arts Center and numerous university departments and schools.
The project's core objective is to establish sustainable support for ongoing programs and initiatives that prioritize co-creation with and within the community. This entails forging and nourishing partnerships with organizations, artists/creatives and arts administrators who share values aligned with anti-extractive, regenerative and critically-reflexive paradigms. Central to this collaborative effort is the commitment to prioritize care, culture and justice. Moreover, the existing arts ecosystem and collaborative relationships among grant partners underscore the practicality and sustainability of this collective endeavor.
Primary Investigators
JONI BOYD ACUFF
Professor (AAEP)
Joni Boyd Acuff serves as department chair and diversity chair in the Department of Arts Administration, Education and Policy, where her goal has been to recruit, admit and retain students from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds. Acuff teaches undergraduate and graduate students in the art education program and utilizes frameworks such as critical multiculturalism, critical race theory, Black feminist theory and Afrofuturism to develop pedagogical and curriculum strategies for art education.
TERRON BANNER
Manager of Community Learning and Experience (Urban Arts Space)
As an artist, Banner advocates for open access, just resource allocation and culturally-relevant decisions made in the arts administration and arts management process. As an educator, he supports culturally-responsive teaching that accounts for the lived experiences of students. As a researcher, he seeks to encourage more education reform discussions that are grounded in issues covering cultural diversity and socioeconomics.
