How we came to Focus on Creative Advocacy

Every story begins with a complex backstory and what is presented in the pages of this Creative Advocacy Playbook is no different. Of course, not every backstory is equally important to understand. So, some of what follows may not be critical for every reader to absorb at the outset. If you prefer to get down to action, then feel free to skip over this section until it becomes helpful.

For those who are interested in understanding the history behind the work presented here, this opening section shares that 15-year trajectory as it has emerged across numerous communities, organizations, and contexts.

In what follows, we briefly explain the organizations who have spearheaded this work. We begin by discussing the issue of capital absorption and its relationship to creativity and community building. We then talk a bit about cultural changes that have taken place throughout the 15-year history of our organizations. Finally, we briefly explain how this playbook relates to other documents and processes that are currently being employed by organizations throughout western Pennsylvania and beyond.

Capital Absorption as a form of Community Building

New Sun Rising and RiverWise are two closely aligned nonprofits, helping communities to lead and benefit from the future they envision. Established in 2005, New Sun Rising has provided capacity building services to more than 400 nonprofits, social enterprises, and collaborations, while making $15+ million of funding and financing more accessible.

RiverWise, an offshoot and partner of New Sun Rising, formally emerged in 2018, in response to the building of a $7 billion petrochemical facility in the heart of its footprint. Since it was founded, RiverWise has worked alongside a growing network of more than 70 regional partners to secure nearly $2 million in direct investment and over $4 million for mission aligned projects that aid individuals, organizations, and collaboratives in organizing community power and voice.

Over the course of its nearly 20-year history, New Sun Rising has worked diligently to test, document, and communicate a series of pathways for communities to ignite, launch, and grow their capacity. First outlined in the Vibrant Communities Handbook (2017) and later expanded in the Vibrant Communities Toolkit (2020), the processes and strategies identified by New Sun Rising have been adapted by grassroots, organizational, and municipal leaders alike.

In the process of working across more than 50 different neighborhoods, New Sun Rising has repeatedly observed communities that, despite their obvious desire for growth and change, remained underprepared to manage sustained and transformational investments. Although communities typically understand their limitations and needs, they often remain stuck in patterns of activity that make it difficult to overcome suboptimal conditions. While residents or organizations routinely rise up to meet specific challenges, communities in transition consistently lack the internal capacity and/or alignment required to build power and direct sustained investments of community capital over time. Other barriers come in the form of systemic conditions which make harnessing community capital so challenging.

The earliest iterations of New Sun Rising’s work focused on building community and organizational capacity to absorb three critically important types of investments: financial, human, and social capital. Individuals and organizations were identified, trained on strategy and process, and resourced, all with the goal of creating more vibrant conditions within the life of the community. Along the way, regular and progressively more substantial investments were secured throughout the 2010s, helping communities take action towards the future they envisioned for themselves. The approach and results of such work are summarized in this 2021 Annual Report

Changing Cultural Conditions

As New Sun Rising continued to evolve and deepen its understanding of where it could most add value to community capacity building, two significant developments challenged us to think more broadly about the issue of capital absorption. The first of these issues was global, the other was much closer to home.

Since New Sun Rising’s founding in 2005, substantial changes have washed over communities all across the country and the world. At the heart of many of these changes is a repeated pattern of paradox that manifests in numerous ways throughout community life.

» Though communities have become increasingly connected via technology, such tools have divided us in increasingly problematic ways.

» Though communities are more fully aware of their need for collective action, they are becoming less and less capable of collaboration and constructive compromise.

» Though communities have greater access to information than ever before, they are less certain about who and what information they should trust.

» Though communities are more aware of the need for increased equity and inclusion, they more acutely feel the negative impact of its absence.

» Though society is awash in resources that should be useful for overcoming the challenges we face, such resources are neither widely accessible nor directed by those who need them most.

As socioeconomic disparities became front and center in our public discourse, New Sun Rising deepened their focus on the systemic causes at the root of these issues. Yes, financial, human, and social capital remain extremely important to community building. But in order to grow collective voice and power, people would need to acknowledge and nurture additional community capitals. Faced with mounting headwinds fueled by these patterns of paradox, we felt the urgent need for new tools promoting healthier natural, built, and political capital flow.

Settling on the Importance of Creative Advocacy

In 2018, as New Sun Rising was starting to explore the role of data, collaboration, and the important role of culture in systems change, a new organization, RiverWise, was born 30 miles north of downtown Pittsburgh. The emergence of RiverWise was, in many ways, built upon the shoulders of New Sun Rising’s 15-year history of iterative community capacity building. Many of the same needs that New Sun Rising had helped others to address were also being faced throughout RiverWise’s footprint. Persistent disinvestment, failing physical and relational infrastructure, limited vision for the future, lack of capacity and leadership — all these and more were shared characteristics of the communities that RiverWise set out to support.

Although many of the conditions that RiverWise was seeking to address were very similar to those that had long been addressed by New Sun Rising, there were several distinctives that helped to bring the need for focusing on cultural capital into clearer view.

First, whereas New Sun Rising set out to work specifically with grassroots projects and disinvested communities on the verge of gentrification, RiverWise deliberately directed its efforts toward an entire county (Beaver County, PA). So, whereas New Sun Rising was, at least in its early stages, focused primarily on hyperlocal efforts, RiverWise was launched with a regional focus squarely in mind.

Second, given Beaver County’s storied history related to the collapse of the American steel industry and lack of recovery, many of its most serious impediments to change were related to shifting people’s mindset. Getting to the point where such places could begin to think about strengthening community capitals required an earlier and more fundamental step, namely getting them to think differently about their role in generating change.

Third, the founding of RiverWise emerged amidst the construction of a $7 billion petrochemical facility at the heart of its geography. Seemingly overnight, a county comprised of 160,000 residents, 54 municipalities, and a history of limited cooperation had become home to one of the largest financial investments in the country, if not the world. Although few communities would likely be well prepared for such an event, it’s not an understatement to say that Beaver County was uniquely unprepared to respond proactively and collaboratively to the kinds of changes that it was rapidly facing. With limited resources, limited leadership, and very limited time, communities needed to dramatically augment their capacity to actively direct the future. They needed to gain citizen agency, vision, voice, and collaborative capacity across 450 square miles. RiverWise and Beaver County, like so many other communities, needed to be able to fight way above their weight. And it needed to do so quickly.

Partly through intuition, and partly through accident, RiverWise set out in late 2018 to generate a more robust regional identity and vision by centering the importance of storytelling and advocacy. RiverWise embedded a professional videographer in its organization from day one, it used high quality digital storytelling to foreground stories of regional cooperation and progress, experimented with regional art projects , it engaged in increasingly visible public writing about the life of the community, and it worked increasingly toward coordinated advocacy efforts directed at specific causes. Partly inspired by these efforts, an artist collaborative was created in Beaver County, numerous visible projects were brought to the public’s attention and funded, and at least some subset of the community began to think differently about their future. Operating with relatively few financial resources, and partnering with a growing team of creatives, RiverWise was able to establish itself as a visible leader in the region and, more important, with a growing subset of the general public.

At the same time that RiverWise was undertaking these humble steps toward better understanding the importance of cultural capital in advocacy, New Sun Rising was making a number of targeted investments in its ability to collect, organize, and visualize community-level data. Technological investments were made, human resources were mobilized, stakeholders were engaged, and teams of researchers were assembled to explore how best to utilize qualitative and quantitative data in service to community change. As a result, New Sun Rising’s Power in Numbers initiative, including its Vibrancy Portal platform and Data Story Reports, started to be utilized by more and more local organizations to make the case for greater investment and mobilization of community capitals.

Intentional Collaboration and Investment in Creative Advocacy

Inspired by the rapid socioeconomic disruption amplified by COVID-19, New Sun Rising and RiverWise began collaborating at an increasing rate around the necessity of creative advocacy. Both as thought partners and as co-creators, our organizations have worked hard to understand how our unique competencies related to data, storytelling, advocacy, and capacity building can be further brought to bear within the communities we work. As we have tested and witnessed the benefits of creative advocacy, we have come to recognize the importance of deepening, extending, and codifying our emerging efforts so that others can share in our learnings. It is for this reason, and hoping that such insights will be useful for growing community advocacy efforts, that we have undertaken the creation of this playbook.

Rooted in strategies intended to ignite, launch, and grow capacity as outlined in the Vibrant Communities Toolkit, the Creative Advocacy Playbook seeks to be highly adaptive, evolving, and practically applicable for everyday practitioners of community-focused work. At its core, we intend to offer a way of thinking and coordinating action that learns from past successes (and failures), reflects on changing cultural conditions, and responds to evident and widespread community needs. In the end, the Vibrant Communities Framework and Creative Advocacy Playbook offer a thoughtful overview of the patterns of processes, competencies, and dispositions that tend to persist in healthy and vibrant communities.

Meaningful ideas rarely emerge in a vacuum, and our understanding of creative advocacy is no exception. The leadership of New Sun Rising and RiverWise have engaged in ongoing research, study, and discussion about the history which underpins our approach. We recognize that many artists and creative community builders have been deploying related tactics for years. The Creative Advocacy Playbook seeks to both recognize and amplify their efforts. Our journey of ideas and inspiration is ongoing but rooted in the mid-20th century history of Social Psychology (Berneys), Institutional Persuasion (Packard 1957), and Paradigm Shift (Kuhn 1962). The concepts of Social Capital (Putnum), Democracy Inversion (Russell), and New Power (Heimans and Timms) helped to expand this field of knowledge in the 21st century. Additional reference to these foundational concepts can be found in the playbook. Considerably more research and learning can and must be accomplished.

We hope that sharing this historical and cultural context offers a deeper understanding of forces used to shape perceptions and the future of communities. While we share the goal of traditional advocacy to influence decision makers, the interest of creative advocacy is not primarily limited to matters of public policy. Creative advocacy offers a path forward for people and communities seeking to build greater capacity to nurture and absorb all types of capital — especially cultural — in a 21st century reality.

Creative advocacy offers a path forward for communities seeking to build greater capacity to nurture and absorb all types of capital - especially cultural - in a 21st century reality.