An experience doesn’t have to venture into fraught topics to be valuable in highly partisan times; spending time together doing just about anything can increase social bonds. But when the topic you’re building experiences around can in itself activate differing values and ideologies and lead to conflict, you can find yourself, in real time, at the intersection of social isolation, lack of trust and polarization. How do you then chart a productive, ethical course towards your aim of social connection amidst the reality of colliding perspectives? How do we do that?

After spending time over the last 15 months in 30 mostly small, rural communities, I’m thinking about the trust that theatre can help build in all sorts of rooms with all sorts of people, especially when there is shared purpose.

Now is a time for artists and arts organizations to stand shoulder to shoulder with other fields and disciplines that produce care in our communities. Using our resources and creativity, let’s remind those around us, near and far- Civic Care matters, and you don’t want to live in a place where it doesn’t.

At a time when growing social, political, and ideological divisions seem to pull our social fabric at every end, a question emerges: What future is possible at the intersection of our increasing diversity and diminishing cohesion? And how do we reach it? In conversation with this question, One Nation/One Project (ONOP) created a multi-year national arts and health initiative in which eighteen United States communities, diverse in size and geography, built collaborations across municipal, health, and arts sectors to increase community wellbeing through the arts.

Co-design, regardless of where you sit, is about accountability and decision making and how, ideally, residents in a place are partners in the process of designing solutions and visions for their community. Theatremakers are uniquely positioned to make a difference in this space with creativity around who and how we engage. We can slow down how we build relationships, look beyond transactional project-based engagements, and rethink structural changes as a way to create more lasting impact, inside and outside our artistic practices.