1. Applicant Organization

Please provide a brief description of the mission and activities of the applicant organization.

The applicant organization, the Arts and Culture Division of the City of Richmond, California, is located within the Library and Cultural Services Department of the City of Richmond. Our organization oversees the Public Art Program in the city and serves as liaison between the City Council, arts and culture organizations, artists, and businesses in matters regarding arts and culture. The Arts and Culture Manager, Michele Seville, is Staff to the Richmond Arts and Culture Commission (RACC), composed of eleven volunteers appointed by the Mayor. The RACC advises the City on matters concerning arts and culture, and is the oversight body for the selection, installation and acquisition of public art. The mission of the Arts and Culture Commission, in addition to implementing the Public Art Program, is to develop programs to further public awareness and understanding of visual and performing arts, build community through the arts, and reflect the rich cultural diversity and historical resources of Richmond. The commission sponsors an annual event celebrating Arts and Humanities month in October, participates in various city festivals, generates public art maps, advocates for and helps facilitate City support of art non-profits, and gives out mini-grants to emerging arts and cultural organizations. For the past year Richmond has been participating in developing an East Bay Cultural Corridor with the cities of Berkeley, Oakland, and Emeryville to market our collective arts and cultural assets, events, and organizations.

Describe the relevance of the project to the organization’s mission.

The East Bay Stories of Empathy Project is relevant to our mission because it engages a diverse cross-section of the community we serve in the collaborative production of a body of artwork through a process that honors each group/individual’s perspective while at the same time providing participants with a chance to learn to understand one another’s perspectives. Because this project is about sharing perspectives, the rich cultural diversity of the project’s participants will be recognized and celebrated – and at the same time the culturally diverse points of view within our community will have a chance to be considered publicly and compared collectively through public viewings of the video and the body of artwork generated by participants in the project. This process will further public awareness and understanding of the many diverse cultural groups in our community, and will do so through a very personal, arts-based process. In addition, this project is being developed in coordination with the City of Richmond’s Neighborhood Public Art project (NPA). The fiscal sponsor manages the annual NPA program from April to October, which focuses on creating public works of art, such as murals, sculptures and performances. This year (2009) the NPA has chosen ‘empathy’ as its theme, and is developing a project in which a community-based artist will be exploring how to express the emotion of empathy via the visual and performing arts. The two projects will share information and compare community input, thereby augmenting and expanding the content and the richness of both, which will in turn greatly enhance the positive impact these projects have on the communities we serve.

If the applicant organization is acting as a fiscal sponsor, describe how the project director and fiscal organization will work together to administer the project.

The goal of this project is to create a partnership among many Richmond area and East Bay organizations and individuals in a collective exploration of the human value of empathy through storytelling.  Project Director Edwin Rutsch and Richmond Arts and Culture Manager Michele Seville will meet every 2 weeks in person to coordinate administrative duties.  Rutsch and his team are responsible for recruiting individual participants for this project; conducting interviews; organizing and executing workshops; all aspects of video production; and some of the publicity work related to the project’s culminating public event. Seville is the project’s liaison between Rutsch’s team and the many relevant community organizations who will be invited to participate in this project; she will assist in promoting the project to Richmond organizations, including the City Mayor's office, the Arts Commission, all 32 Richmond Neighborhood Councils, as well as various arts and social organizations, and will provide fiscal and logistical oversight for the project.  Rutsch, Seville, and members of the project team will collaborate through an ongoing project listserver and direct email correspondence.  Progress reports will be distributed via email and posted on the Empathy Stories website for monitoring.