By bringing in the arts, we finally were able to tell the story in a way people understood. By putting the employees out front – the folks that are in the trenches, making life rescues, making sure that the pumps are working properly – it made this emotional connection with the community that we just didn’t have before.
Jodi Jay | Assistant Director, Department of Parks and Recreation, City of Austin
Introduction
From 2017-2019, the City of Austin’s Parks & Recreation Department’s Aquatics Division partnered with the lauded Forklift Danceworks to engage East Austin residents along with city leadership and staff in a creative, participatory process to help equitably address the infrastructure crisis facing the city’s public pools, turn a community sore spot into joyful experiences for all, and build trust between city staff and residents.
Challenge
Austin’s public pools are a critical piece of community infrastructure, offering social connection and ensuring that all residents have options to cool off during hot summers. Public pools are costly to maintain, and in East Austin – where Austin’s residents of color had historically relocated, and where residents rely on public pools – were in great need of repairs. In 2014, an Aquatic Needs Assessment showed that the city’s public pools were in dire need of investment. Many residents shared that past community engagement had not been robust, and opposed the implication that many pools would need to close. Others highlighted that the assessment did not adequately consider race and a history of segregation.
City leaders hoped that taking a new approach – forming a task force, proposing a bond measure to supplement funding, and embedding artists within the city department to lead a more comprehensive, creative engagement process – would help build awareness and momentum for this critical piece of the city’s social and physical infrastructure. The residency was intentionally aligned with a revised, comprehensive Aquatics Master Plan, which detailed the scale of the infrastructure needs facing city pools and emphasized the importance of investing in them going forward.
Impact
“Rebuilding trust between the city and community is a work in progress, and challenging for all of us. My Park, My Pool, My City gave us a way to collaborate and became a catalyst to stay engaged in our work together. Now, the Givens Park Working Group continues to help us rebuild trust on this side of town, in creating a safe space for the community and the city to dialogue and work together to complete the projects in a transparent way. “
Steven Brown, Chair of Givens Park Working Group
My Park, My Pool, My City was a three-year artistic residency within the Parks & Recreation department, during which Forklift Danceworks orchestrated a series of three highly participatory summer performances. These dynamic, unique, and joyful performances (Bartholomew Swims, Nadamos Dove Springs, and Givens Swims) were choreographed and performed in the pools, and featured residents sharing stories of their connection to the pool as well as city employees showcasing their daily work. Alongside the performances, Forklift hosted and participated in town hall gatherings, community workshops, film screenings, and pool parties that redefined community engagement for the city departments and employees involved. The residency was funded in part by an Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
After the residency ended, the benefits of this intensive creative collaboration have continued to grow. A study of the residency conducted by Lynn Osgood, Executive Director of Civic Arts, showed that it “improved relationships between citizens and city employees, enhanced residents’ sense of agency by providing a platform to connect with city leadership and learn about municipal systems, and activated citizens and city employees to improve the public parks and pools of Austin’s Eastern Crescent.” The study also showed that city officials now see the value of bringing the arts in for more successful community engagement as well as for ongoing systems change.
As a result of these combined efforts to galvanize community support for public pools as critical infrastructure, in 2018, Austinites voted in favor of a city bond package that included $40 million in capital funds, while the city increased the yearly operations and maintenance budget by $1 million. With robust community support, the bond funds have been used to upgrade many pools in neighborhoods whose infrastructure has been historically and chronically underfunded. In addition, city staff are still regularly in communication with community leaders and residents they met through My Park, My Pool, My City.
Many long-term impacts are present specifically in the redesign of Givens Pool, the site of the third year of the performance residency; the pool closed in 2019 and is undergoing renovations with the plan to reopen in Summer 2025. The Givens Swims performance joyfully reenacted critical pieces of community history, including beauty pageants that were once held at the pool. This aspect of the performance inspired the designers to include a pool deck extended like a catwalk into the water in order to honor this community story. Givens Pool is a particularly important community site: named for Dr. Everett H. Givens, a civil rights leader, the pool is located in a predominantly African American neighborhood within East Austin that has seen rapid displacement of African American residents.
Impacts can also be seen in the design process itself. Knowing the important role the park and pool play in this community’s social fabric, before the pool closed for renovations, the community formed a working group to guide the park’s redevelopment. The working group reports to the African American Resource Advisory Commission, a body that is appointed by the Austin City Council. Relationships built during the residency helped manage the transition with increased communication and supported the growth of meaningful civic dialogue.
Lessons for City Leaders
- Embedding community-engaged artists in city departments through residencies can help break down barriers between city administrative and operational staff and the residents they serve, offering an alternative to typical community engagement processes.
- The ripples of an intensive creative process can be felt for many years and play out in myriad ways – helping to create ongoing collaborations for neighborhood safety, ensuring that infrastructure is designed with community needs in mind, and making engagement a two-way street with transparency about progress.
- Providing an exciting, joyful platform for residents to rally around community assets and shared history can help community leaders make the case for transformative funding for disinvested areas.
Videos
Click to view My Park, My Pool, My City performances:
Bartholomew Swims +
Nadamos Dove Springs +
Givens Swims +
