History & Partner Profile

Founded in 2024, Arts SoCo builds on two decades of the Guy Mendilow Ensemble's touring and residency experience. The organization also incorporates a two-year piloting phase (as Inquiry Arts) that tested initial methodologies. In bringing on Regie Gibson as Co-Artistic Director, Arts SoCo also draws on his extensive performance and pedagogical expertise since 1998, and on the seven multidisciplinary productions Regie and Guy have co-written and co-directed since 2017. Core cohesion processes were likewise honed for years prior to organizational launch. For example, Regie steadily evolved Ponder to Page across myriad iterations with hundreds of students since 2019 while the Listening Lab extends back to Guy’s organizational consensus facilitation and training leadership since 1997.  

While the founders' previous artistic work generated social benefits, Arts SoCo formed to make group resilience and social cohesion the primary mission, developing and testing methodologies integrating evidence-based applied social psychology with artistic and pedagogical designs.

Arts SoCo partners with a range of groups, from humanitarian, campus, healthcare and business organizations to communities of faith and neighbors working together. 

Partners range from Oxfam America and the TogetherUP Institute to Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. 

Though Arts SoCo is guided by approaches to conflict mediation, Arts SoCo is not itself a conflict mediation service. We help build the relational muscle that allows groups to navigate change and tension in healthy ways, rather than flaring up as crisis.

Three main contexts usually describe our partners:

• Expanding — helping members of already strong, collaborative groups see more of one another. Further deepening bonds strengthens trust, psychological safety and dignity that, in turn, increase a sense of wellbeing and collaboration. 

• Cultivating — helping communities strengthen relationships proactively, preventing inevitable tensions from erupting into crisis. The stronger this relational foundation is, the greater the group’s capacities to collaborate through friction, channeling disagreement into productive adaptation together. 

• Reimagining — helping those so exhausted from the stuckness of us vs. them that they become willing to try something bold: pause, step back from “the issue” and complicate the narrative (!) — beyond the monster masks pinned on each other. What have “they” been through that brings them to see, believe and choose as they do? What matters to them in their lives? What are their hopes and fears? While necessitating neither agreement nor endorsement, understanding more of each other’s complex humanity and underlying values opens possibilities for perceptions about disconnect to loosen, making paths forward together at least conceivable. Subsequent mediation efforts building on this relational foundation are often more effective (2).

Arts SoCo is affiliated with mediation organizations and can offer referrals.