Cultural Collaboration and
Community Engagement
Heart of Brooklyn (HOB) and its member institutions are conducting an exciting cultural research project, Building Strong Community Networks, examining the factors that encourage or inhibit meaningful and systemic collaborations between cultural institutions and their communities.
The need for this project has grown out of numerous professional conferences, studies and conversations over the past decade that have indicated cultural institutions must collectively support systemic community engagement to remain relevant for 21st century society.
The goal of this research is to demonstrate how cultural institutions — museums, libraries, parks, zoos, botanic gardens — can effectively partner to build mutually beneficial community networks. With Heart of Brooklyn's successful community partnerships as a model, the project aims to develop practical recommendations for cultural institutions to proactively engage their communities, forecast emerging needs and trends, and keep pace with cultural and societal change. The project's working model for successful collaboration is outlined in the project's Position Paper, which synthesizes inputs from all workshop participants.
Sharing insights from a cultural perspective.
The Institute for Learning Innovation (ILI) and the Center for the Study of Brooklyn (CSB) at Brooklyn College are HOB's research partners on this project. The core research involves inviting experts representing cultural institutions across Brooklyn and the country to share their insights and conducting focus groups and community-based conversations engaging with these questions.
Through this project, Heart of Brooklyn will establish a model for cultural institutions to be more decisively at the center of their communities and apply their extensive resources to addressing community needs in a collective and meaningful way.
