Rarely do matchmakers possess vision, intuition and resources, but miraculously, Tampa Bay has just such a gifted group. The Gobioff Foundation has been generously granting funds to further the arts and human rights here for a decade.
They recently unveiled a fresh initiative, Tampa Treasure (T²): a creative place-making opportunity focused on collaborative programs between artists and communities with issues. With an October 17 deadline for the first proposals (see sidebar), T² is off and running.
The foundation was created in 2007 by Howard Gobioff, an early employee of Google, to “make the world a better place.” After his sudden death the following year from lymphoma at age 36, his brother and sister-in-law, Tampa residents Neil Gobioff and Gianna Rendina-Gobioff, moved the headquarters to Tampa Bay, focusing locally on support of the arts and internationally on human rights and civil liberties.
As Neil traveled around the country, educating himself about the most innovative programs in the funding world, he met Jamie Bennett, director of ArtPlace America, a 10-year collaboration between private foundations, government agencies and financial institutions all working to improve communities, using arts as the driver.
ArtPlace has a very open mind. First of all, it defines the arts broadly to include craft and culinary arts, design and architecture, and folk and traditional arts, along with art forms like dance and theater. Secondly, ArtPlace believes that the arts deserve to be woven into the fabric of our lives, not just as a monthly treat, but as part of our daily experience.
I’m not usually enthused about diagrams, but ArtPlace developed a “bingo” card with organizations along one side and public activities along the other.
This simple but powerful matrix helps us understand which groups can make things happen in our communities.
Their research has documented what arts activists know intuitively, that local economic development is driven by culture: witness the success of Central Avenue in St. Pete and Seminole Heights in Tampa. Also, people who come together to make art are more civically engaged, as in the SHINE mural project.
ArtPlace then poses four key questions: 1.What is the geographic community? 2. What is the desired community change? 3. How will the arts help achieve that change? 4. How will you know that the change is happening?
The $300,000 ArtPlace grants are quite competitive, with 200 applicants vying for each grant. Although the City of Tampa has applied twice, for the Lights on Tampa Public Art Program, we haven’t yet been successful.
Other cities which were funded undertook amazing projects, such as placing the Museum for Storytelling in New York City in the ground floor of a shelter for homeless families. By bringing middle-class children and their caretakers into the same building, it undercut the social stigma of entering that building. It also offered children traumatized by homelessness the storytelling skills to imagine a new narrative for their lives.
Perhaps the most poetic project was geared to help former prisoners in Philadelphia rethink their new lives. After working with lawyers in free legal clinics to clear or clean up their prison records, the ex-offenders teamed up with artists to shred, pulp and transform the documents into fresh sheets of paper. The People’s Paper Co-op not only teaches participants paper-making skills, through which they create and sell handmade books and journals; the pages of their prison records are continually being sewn together to create a giant paper quilt, an art piece, says the co-op, that emphasizes “the collective impact of expungement.”
Residents of public housing often lack the time and money to spend much on home decoration. In Charlottesville, architects and interior designers worked with public housing tenants, offering advice on design choices as they bought paint and other materials using $1,500 stipends for their apartments.
Dancers certainly know about moving thoughtfully through space. In Takoma Park, MD, the city’s transportation department imaginatively paired itself with a local dance troupe to design public transportation spaces.
These unlikely insertions of artists into normally bureaucratic realms, resulting in better community outcomes and much more fun, proved inspiring to the Gobioff Foundation. ArtPlace’s Bennett is happy to have played a role.
“I was thrilled to be back in Tampa to help continue the conversation that Neil [Gobioff] and I started last February at the Florida Philanthropy Network,” said Bennett, who spoke at the launch of T² last month. “And I cannot wait to see what ideas are generated by the community here.”
By providing $30,000 grants, the Gobioffs hope to nurture creative place-making in Tampa. To be eligible, a project must take place in Tampa or the neighborhood served by the University Area CDC.
Exciting seed money for our creative community, and it’s all at tampatreasure.org. Go forth and put on your thinking caps!
This article appears in Oct 13-20, 2016.
