Last year, the City of Portland launched an art-focused community healing initiative -- a community-informed project designed to leverage the power of arts and culture to support grieving and healing throughout Portland’s diverse communities. Led by our former creative laureate, Subashini Ganesan-Forbes, the City partnered with 16 artists and 33 nonprofit organizations to present a multitude of performances, exhibits, workshops, and other activities that have served an estimated 5,000 Portlanders.
In a presentation to City Council on February 23, Ganesan-Forbes said, “this initiative provided the possibility for artists, arts collaboratives, and community partners to build activations and events that began to provide avenues for their community members to start expressing their sense of living through these times."
A full list of the activities included in this initiative appears in a final report that is available here.
"The power of arts and culture is that they can cut through barriers and get straight to the heart of things, if you will," says Ganesan-Forbes. "The arts build relationships, oftentimes between unlikely parties, and encourage a type of empathy that is profound and so needed in these current times that are still tender and fragile for so many in our city and globally."