New Community Engagement Strategies to Bridge Participation Gaps for Southeast Philadelphia Residents

The Fleisher Art Memorial has made significant investments in its ability to understand the composition and motivations of its current audience and future participant groups in Southeast Philadelphia through onside and community-centered audience research. This three-year initiative was made possible by a $370,000 Excellence Award from the Wallace Foundation in 2008. Fleisher was intent on using the research to fuel an organization-wide process to transform and strengthen management capacity and develop training and pilot programs to advance community engagement competencies among the staff and board, such as cultural awareness and partnership building skills. The results of these efforts led to expansion of the scope of existing programming, and the design of new initiatives that will support Fleisher's community engagement goals to progressively increase participation by targeted stakeholders over the coming years.