Accelerating the strong relationships enabling groups to better navigate change, tensions and opportunities
We partner with humanitarian, campus, healthcare, neighborhood and faith groups.
We integrate the distinct advantages of the arts with design principles for connection across differences.
To increase collaboration, a board or leadership team invests in trainings and communication technology. Yet often members hold back from voicing their opinions, unsure whether they’ll be acknowledged. They hardly know one another beyond titles and expertise.
Inspired to launch a mutual aid group, neighbors flyer each house on three streets. But only a handful attend the meetings. Most neighbors don’t know the people behind most doors.
To retain exhausted volunteers, a
church sponsors a volunteer appreciation brunch, an easier digital calendar system, and video spots about how important volunteers are. Yet many volunteers feel they have little say about decisions, and that they don’t really know many in the community beyond being co-congregants.
In each case, the changes are likely limited and short-lived.[i]
That’s because many complexities groups face emerge from two linked domains: relationships and structures. [ii]
Durable change = relationships + structure
We help groups tackle such complexities by partnering on cohesion campaigns strengthening key relationships and addressing structures.
We design cohesion interventions that use the arts to effect long-lasting relationship shifts through relatively brief experiences1 requiring few resources.
Distinct advantages of an arts-based approach
Artistic experiences help us “human” each other: They tunnel below surface positions to the deeper values and experiences behind a person’s choices — their story. [iii]
Being moved by a person’s story increases empathy and identification with a person across differences. [iv] Understanding why someone sees and chooses as they do requires neither agreement nor equivalence. [v]
The arts make building group resilience and capacities feel joyful and alive. They motivate participation, bypassing the heavy connotations of “dialogue” [vi].
How we contribute:
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Cohesion Campaigns
Cohesion campaigns tackle complex group challenges by addressing relationships and structures, in partnership, through a sequence of carefully planned actions.
Cohesion campaigns address a partner’s aim — from sustaining members’ engagement, increasing collaboration or undertaking bold initiatives to navigating change and conflict.
Cohesion campaigns pursue the aim by addressing the relationships and structures underlying the issue.
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Trainings
Arts SoCo is building a systematic, replicable and trainable arts-based approach to increase cohesion.
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Original productions
Arts SoCo produces live, original multidisciplinary performances. Through powerful spoken word, score and song, Arts SoCo’s performances explore real-world choices people make in times of personal or societal change, and especially unexpected grace amidst upheaval.
i. For how improving situations or building skills without addressing subjective meanings tends to produce limited, short-lived results, see for example Menec, V. H., Perry, R. P., Struthers, C. W., Schonwetter, D. J., Hechter, F. J., & Eichholz, B. L. (1994). Assisting at-risk college students with attributional retraining and effective teaching. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 24(8), 675–701. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1994.tb00607.x; Bandura, A., & Schunk, D. H. (1981). Cultivating competence, self-efficacy, and intrinsic interest through proximal self-motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(3), 586–598. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.41.3.586
ii. For mutual dependence of psychological and structural conditions, see for example Walton, G. M., & Wilson, T. D. (2018). Wise interventions: Psychological remedies for social and personal problems. Psychological Review, 125(5), 617–655. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000115 — p. 618.For the interplay of relationships and institutions at neighborhood level, see Kaplan, S. D. (2023). Fragile neighborhoods: Repairing American society, one zip code at a time. Little, Brown Spark.
iii. For an elaboration of tunneling from positions through interests and to core needs, see for example Ury, W. (2024). Possible: How we survive (and thrive) in an age of conflict. Harper Business — pp. 73–92. See also Ripley, A. (2018, June 27; updated 2019). Complicating the narratives. Solutions Journalism Network. https://thewholestory.solutionsjournalism.org/complicating-the-narratives-b91ea06ddf63 — “Ask questions that get to people’s motivations.”
For complicating flattened narratives, see Coleman, P. T. (2021). The way out: How to overcome toxic polarization. Columbia University Press — “Complicate.”
For how arts-based settings reach past roles and titles to personal stories, see for example Lee, D. (2013). How the arts generate social capital to foster intergroup social cohesion. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 43(1), 4–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/10632921.2012.761167 — pp. 8, 10; and Taylor, C., & Wei, Q. (2020). Storytelling and arts to facilitate community capacity building for urban planning and social work. Societies, 10(3), 64. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc10030064 — p. 10, “It taps into something deeper with fellow neighbors and friends that we don’t get to in the day to day.”
For art making as showing oneself and being seen, see Sagan, O. (2025). Loneliness, social cohesion, and the role of art making. Societies, 15(9), 237. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15090237 — pp. 8–9.
iv. For how being moved by a person’s story increases empathy and identification with that person across differences, see for example Kalla, J. L., & Broockman, D. E. (2020). Reducing exclusionary attitudes through interpersonal conversation: Evidence from three field experiments. American Political Science Review, 114(2), 410–425. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000923; and Aron, A., Melinat, E., Aron, E. N., Vallone, R. D., & Bator, R. J. (1997). The experimental generation of interpersonal closeness: A procedure and some preliminary findings. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23(4), 363–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167297234003. As an illustration, see Ripley, A. (2021). High conflict: Why we get trapped and how we get out. Simon & Schuster — p. 268.
v. For understanding as distinct from agreement, see Hicks, D. (2011). Dignity: Its essential role in resolving conflict. Yale University Press, pp. 49–62, 81–85; and Ripley (2018). For the same finding in an arts-based storytelling program, see Taylor & Wei (2020), p. 6 — participants “make room for each other’s differences without having to agree with those differences.”
vi. For the “exhausted majority,” see Hawkins, S., Yudkin, D., Juan-Torres, M., & Dixon, T. (2018). Hidden tribes: A study of America’s polarized landscape. More in Common — Ch. 6.
For polarization fatigue, see Coleman (2021).
For arts participation as a low-threshold way in — engaging “in a non-intimidating manner,” with “fun” the word participants used most — see Lee (2013), pp. 9–10; and Taylor & Wei (2020), p. 10. For joy, vitality and feeling valued as reported outcomes of arts engagement across studies, see Pesata, V., Colverson, A., Sonke, J., Morgan-Daniel, J., Schaefer, N., Sams, K., Carrion, F. M.-E., & Hanson, S. (2022). Engaging the arts for wellbeing in the United States of America: A scoping review. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 791773. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.791773 — p. 7.
For apolitical, human-centered storytelling enabling connection across differences, see Thomas, H. (in press). Participant experiences of “In Our Words”: The case study of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and Temple Israel of Boston [Arts evaluation brief]. Incevia Policy Partners — “Key Findings.”