Projects and Collaborations

smARTscope™ Program

Through the generous funding of the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago Cultural Alliance and the Arts & Business Council of Chicago are working together to provide the smARTscope™ program to the CCA core members. The Arts & Business Council of Chicago originally developed smARTscope™ as a business analysis instrument for small museums and arts organizations. The goal of the program is to create a balanced and strong organization by strengthening seven key managerial areas:

1. Concept development and planning
2. Staffing and organizational structure
3. Board governance
4. Constituency development and marketing
5. Facilities
6. Income generation
7. Financial management

The initial phase of smARTscope™ is a self-assessment survey that captures board, staff, and volunteer perceptions of each organizations current phase of development and measures their management capacity and performance. The CCA has worked closely with representatives of our core members and the Arts & Business Council of Chicago to modify the survey tool so that it speaks directly to our members’ needs, missions, and programs.

Following the successful administration of the survey, core member organizations will work closely with a consultant from the Arts & Business Council of Chicago and CCA staff to address the survey’s results. Through these sessions, core members use the survey’s results and past challenges and successes to discuss strategies for strengthening their management capacity and resource base. Through the discovery of key challenges experienced by our core members, the CCA will develop programs and strategies to support them.

With the generous funding of the Joyce Foundation, we are able to provide this programming free of charge to CCA core members. The average cost for smARTscope is $5,000. The CCA is pleased to offer smARTscope™ as our first initiative and through this process, we hope to identify other areas and programs that we can assist our core members and their constituents.

Fore more information about this program, please contact Rebeccah Sanders at rsanders@chicagoculturalalliance.org.

smARTscope Workshops Schedule (pdf)

Immigration Sites of Conscience Network

The Chicago Cultural Alliance is participating in the “Immigration Sites of Conscience Network,” a project of the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience that will train a group of museums across the country remembering immigration history. These museums will host ongoing, public dialogues on immigration past and present in their communities.

Three members of the Alliance – the Cambodian American Heritage Museum, the Field Museum’s Center for Cultural Understanding and Change and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum will attend a five-day seminar in New York City this summer. These Alliance members will then offer a series of workshops in Chicago during the fall and winter for additional Alliance members and other area museums and cultural centers to deepen their capacity to present programs and activities about immigration. The schedule for the Chicago workshops will be announced early fall in the Alliance website. For more information about the involvement of the Alliance in this project contact Rosa Cabrera at 312-665-7470 or rcabrera@fieldmuseum.org.

Collections Conservation Initiative

The Chicago Cultural Alliance is collaborating with conservators from The Field Museum in order to provide Alliance core members with innovative and useful workshops. These workshops will focus on the conservation of materials including textiles, paper, photographs, jewelry, china/pottery and much more. This program will enable our core members to better facilitate their own conservation efforts whether they are established museums or just beginning to organize a collection. For more information regarding this program, please contact Jenna Norman at jln.cca@gmail.com.

The Field Museum conservators have put together a terrific listing: Online Conservation and Collections Care Resources.

The Digitizing Cultural Project

The Digitizing Cultural Project is a collaborative initiative of the Chicago Cultural Alliance (CCA) that draws from the distinctive resources of its partners and core members to create an innovative digital depository of prints, photographs and other artifacts. The project aims to advance knowledge by preserving and presenting key material currently held by the CCA's cultural institutions. By expanding the availability of these cultural resources in online formats, this community-based initiative will not only expand its access and audiences, but it will also offer their use for teaching, learning and research. This program is still in the developmental stages, but we expect to be looking for funding in the near future.

For more information on the program, please contact Costas Spirou at cspirou@nl.edu.

Chicago Cultural Alliance + Snapshot Chicago

The Chicago Cultural Alliance has partnered with Snapshot Chicago given that the members, friends and visitors of the CCA core member organizations have a complex and rich storybook of personal memories and experiences that reveal distinctive insight as to the early threads of the cultural tapestry that Chicago is today.

CCA's partnership with Snapshot Chicago provides an opportunity for all cultures and communities to share their story -- in images and words – weaving true life color and texture into the virtual fabric of Snapshot Chicago's website while adding an important and sometimes undocumented dimension to Chicago's traditional historic materials.

This partnership offers our CCA members an opportunity to engage old and new audiences and create intergenerational programs, educational initiatives and social/promotional activities to reach out to their own culture as well as many others.

Snapshot Chicago is a pilot for the national organization, Snapshot City, a 501(c)(3) organization.

To access or view the Snapshot Chicago website, go to www.snapshotchicago.net. For more information about this program, please contact Jenna Norman at jln.cca@gmail.com.

Youth Connecting Communities with Nature

The Chicago Cultural Alliance is participating in the summer project "Youth Connecting Communities with Nature." The CCA received a $9,500 grant from Chicago Wilderness's "Leave No Child Inside" initiative for this project, which has participation from four Alliance core members seeking to increase the investment of their youth in nature and their communities' outdoor experiences while exploring cultural assets and social issues that link their communities to nature.

The four members include Bronzeville/Black Chicagoan Historical Society, Indo-American Center, Institute of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture and Swedish American Museum Center. These members will share the grant and will come together to share their projects at Barrio Art Fest 2008 on August 16th. The "Youth Connecting Communities with Nature" project was inspired by ECCo's* New Allies for Nature and Culture effort to build partnerships between organizations that work on environmental, social and cultural issues. *ECCo (Environment, Culture, and Conservation) is a Division of Science at The Field Museum where Cultural Connections resides.

For more information on this project, please contact Sherry Williams at chgoblackhistory@sbcglobal.net or Kirstin Gaspar at KGaspar@samac.org.

The University of Chicago, Center for International Studies offers Curriculum Development Stipends for Core Members

The University of Chicago, Center for International Studies (CIS), is offering stipends in the amount of up to $250 to Chicago Cultural Alliance core members to facilitate in their building of curriculum associated with their cultural center/museum/society. Information on guidelines for curriculum development and application for this stipend can be found on the attached file.

For more information on this project, contact CIS through Jamie Bender at jbender@uchicago.edu or the CCA liaison, Jan Sansone at jansansone@comcast.net.

Guidelines for Curriculum Development (pdf)

Cultural Connections

Cultural Connections is a partnership between The Field Museum and the Chicago Cultural Alliance with over 25 community-based ethnic museums and cultural centers in the Chicago area. Participants travel to partner locations to explore the reasons for cultural differences and to uncover connections to people that they may think of as very different from themselves. The theme for the 2008–2009 program year is BODIES IN MOTION. Under this theme, partners will compare important athletic activities, placing them in the wider context of shared community life. In these comparative presentations participants get the opportunity to be an "urban anthropologist" as they try techniques like cross-cultural comparison, participant observation and intercultural dialogue. For more information on fall 2008 events click on "Events and Meetings" in the menu or visit the Cultural Connections website at www.fieldmuseum.org/culturalconnections.