How do you create a "healthier community"? That was the question Reg Wagle and Rick Strickland, from Memorial Hospital and Health System (hereafter referred to as Memorial) were considering in the fall of 1997, as they and others discussed ways Memorial could use its tithing dollars in new and innovative ways to stimulate community change. How could the concept of "celebration" be used to "build community"?

This paper records "the story...the history" of a collaborative project that nourished the Michiana "community" by using the arts as a medium for communicating between cultures. The story of this project, a celebration of Hispanic culture, called Art from the Heart of the People is told below. The emphasis of the story is not so much on the project (a series of celebrations) per se, but rather on the learnings from the experience; what was learned through the process. How does a healthcare organization, in this case Memorial, make the leap from its intellectual understandings of how to nourish a community to experiential knowledge and learnings. The true test of tithing is personal and organizational involvement, not just financial involvement

What we learned together was that the "creation of art" is an effective metaphor for the creation of a healthier community.

Introduction

Memorial had introduced the "Healthy Communities Movement" to the Michiana area in the early 1990's. This movement, fathered by Trevor Hancock and others, espouses the notion that the quality of a community’s "health" is not measured by the quality of its health care, but rather by the quality of its various parts. These systems and sub-systems include all aspects of the life of the community: education, government, social services, religious institutions, politics, housing, environment, etc.– and healthcare. The movement is built, in part, on some basic assumptions about community health:

an abundance mentality...that a community wants to be the "best" it can be, and is not overwhelmed by negative attitudes; seeing a community as an array of strengths and assets, not an array of problems and needs.
no fear of failure...what is most important is to try, to start.
the healthiest community will be the community in which all the systems are best connected
some individual, organization or event must be a catalyst for change.
the total community must "own" not only its problems but also its solutions.
"check-writing" alone will not change the face of a community.
sub-systems within a community must be linked; many will look like "strange bedfellows".

In the development of concepts that would eventually become HealthWorks! Kids Museum, Memorial had made an important discovery in Barrington, IL called JFK Health world. Memorial sponsored many bus tours to this facility and invited a diverse assortment of community representatives to share in this experience. The South Bend Regional Museum of Art (hereafter referred to as the Museum) sent a representative, Phil Shore. During the trip, Phil and Reg discussed the unique benefits that can rise from offering interactive learning and artistic expression to children and families of diverse cultures. Memorial was already the sponsor of a local "Kwanzaa" celebration of African-American culture held at the Museum. Could a cultural event like this, targeted, in part to children, become one such linkage?