By the S.C. Arts Commission  |  A small group of Walterboro citizens has embraced a new opportunity to make a positive contribution to the community through involvement with the South Carolina Arts Commission.

For several months, Gary Brightwell, director of the Colleton Museum, Farmers Market and Commercial Kitchen, has been leading a team to consider issues local citizens face and how arts and culture might be incorporated to address one or more of those challenges. Last spring, when the South Carolina Arts Commission reached out about a pilot program, The Art of Community: Rural S.C., Brightwell answered the call.  She agreed to serve as the “maven,” or connector, for Colleton County. Today, as part of the Art of Community initiative, she and her team are exploring the most relevant ways to connect local citizens with issues related to food, health and agriculture and adding a dose of arts and culture as a binder.

“When you make a sauce or a soup, you look for that ingredient that holds it together,” Brightwell said.  “Through this new initiative, we’re seeing more clearly how arts and culture is THAT ingredient in our community. It’s a great connecting force,” she said.

“We’re working together to create a video that will be useful in the schools as well as at a number of sites in Walterboro,” she said.  “This experience as part of The Art of Community has resulted in new ideas about what ‘home and belonging’ mean. We’ve talked about how we tell the stories of place, how we celebrate what we have and build from there.  In Colleton County, we have a remarkable story about food and agriculture—we want that to be our starting place. We’ll be working with educators to make this project as meaningful and useful as possible,” she said.

“We are also building partnerships with the local community and are happy to include anyone interested in being part of this effort.  The project itself is community building.”

As Brightwell and her team — Michelle Strickland, Brenda Hughes, Karla Daddieco, Jason Cook, Eartha Cunningham, Jennie Meetze and Jill Chadwick — build on what they’ve learned through The Art of Community: Rural S.C. initiative, they identify these  highlights:

• A field trip for mavens to Kentucky to consider how another rural region addresses its issues, tells its stories and addresses its challenges;
• A series of regional meetings where mavens and team members from throughout a six-county region have come together in a spirit of learning about how to use arts and culture to address community challenges ;
• New relationships with leaders within and beyond the Colleton County line; and
• A new understanding of what “creative placemaking” means.

To aid in the development of the arts and culture “ingredients” for this project and others throughout the six-county region of Allendale, Bamberg, Barnwell, Colleton, Hampton and Jasper counties,  the South Carolina Arts Commission made a $1,000 award to help each local team design, implement and  solicit additional funds for their respective projects.

“We are so happy to have gotten to know more citizens of Colleton County through this initiative,” South Carolina Arts Commission Program Director Susan DuPlessis said. “Not only have we built new relationships within the county, we are also building a regional network of citizens who are community builders.  We are exploring ways that arts and culture can be used to engage people, to rediscover each community’s assets, and to build on those assets.”

About the Art of Community initiative

Part of the strength of the Art of Community is its connectivity both within the state and beyond. The initiative is informed by a committee of 24 advisors who hail from around the country and from within South Carolina. Dr. Ann Carmichael, dean of USC Salkehatchie, and John Robert “Bob” Reeder co-chair the advisory committee. “This initiative is an example of how a state arts commission re-imagines arts and culture within the communities they serve,” said Reeder, a native of Rock Hill, S.C., and program director for Rural LISC, a national community development intermediary working in 44 states. “This effort is being recognized nationally as innovative. Its unique approach—starting with the partnership between a state arts agency and a Promise Zone—is getting well-deserved attention and building new relationships and engagement within small communities.”

Carmichael has hosted two of the three regional meetings for the initiative—one on the USC Salkehatchie campus in Allendale, the other in Walterboro. “It has been our pleasure to work with the Arts Commission on this innovative project.  We get to highlight a major asset of the area—this regional campus of USC—and learn more about the people leading change in our local communities.  It is a win-win,” she said.  Carmichael, a native of Union, S.C., also sits on the board for South Carolina’s Promise Zone in connection with Southern Carolina Alliance.

The Arts Commission received funding from USDA Rural to start this program in South Carolina’s rural Promise Zone in 2015. “As an official partner of the Promise Zone effort and as investors in South Carolina communities through grants, assistance and programming, we are extremely interested in challenges our communities face,” said Ken May, South Carolina Arts Commission executive director. The range of community development issues that have been discussed include health, housing, transportation, safety, environment, economic and workforce development and education. The initiative has also asked the participants to identify what makes them proud of their communities.

“This begins with ‘what works,’ ‘what characteristics do you love about your town,’ and ‘what makes you feel connected.’ The best part is that we are working with the community teams—what happens is born out of local ideas and creativity. It’s exciting and inspiring to watch,” said May.

Seeing some of the innovative efforts in Colleton County begin to pay off is affirming, DuPlessis added.  “With the development of the Commercial Kitchen and Farmers Market as part of a cultural complex in Walterboro, Colleton County has gotten statewide and national attention. It’s a great example of creative placemaking,” she said.

Last year, the Arts Commission collaborated with LISC and IMLS to host a national meeting at the Farmers Market site to discuss what ‘creative placemaking’ means.  The Museum, Commercial Kitchen and Farmers Market was used as a case study in a national report.  (LISC, or Local Initiatives Support Corporation, and IMLS, or Institute for Museum and Library Services, are national entities that collaborated on a study related to creative placemaking: https://www.imls.gov/news-events/news-releases/museums-and-libraries-step-efforts-tackle-economic-distress-poor ).

Also, DuPlessis noted how Colleton County was one of 27 sites chosen nationally for a special community building process called “Local Foods, Local Places,” a program of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“During two days of meetings in August, it was amazing to hear Colleton County citizens speak up about how important arts and culture are here.  There is a lot of pride—and rightly, so,” she said.  Because of the overlap between food, arts, culture and community development, the resulting video project will have been informed by both of these community building efforts. “This is a meaningful and relevant project for Colleton County.  We look forward to supporting it and using it to showcase this county, the Promise Zone region and our state,” she said.

• Brightwell invites others interested in this project to contact her at gbrightwell@colletoncounty.org.