Cutting crime through art
Katz points to places like Maricopa County, Arizona, where law-enforcement officials have set up an arts program to help prevent youth crime. The program hires artists to do "community residencies" with teens who might otherwise be out on the streets.

In Boston, the campaign announced by the Boston Foundation follows more than five years of research into the way art complements the foundation's goal of community-building. After years of being criticized for its lack of support, the foundation now plans to create a permanent fund of at least $10 million to help strengthen participation in the arts.

In fact, applications for the first grants to be distributed from the fund - which will be announced tomorrow - include a wide range of nontraditional projects, such as using dance to help people with mental and physical problems, and working with the elderly to develop their life stories into plays.

"We were astounded by the range and creativity involved in these applications," says Jones. "They all involved a desire to give people a better sense of themselves and their own self-worth."

Under a previous grant program, run as part of its research into the arts and community, Jones and her staff found a broad range of projects. Among them:

• The Back Porch Dance Company, an amateur group of women from different racial backgrounds, who used dance to create the kind of intimacy once marked by sharing news and gossip across the railings of back porches.
  
  
• ZUMIX, a free music program for youths, which set up mentoring projects and included performances by youths at senior center during the holidays.
  
  
• STAGES (Story Telling for the Ages), a project run by a local theater company, which created plays based on the oral histories of senior citizens.

Some critics - most notably Robert Brustein, director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts - criticize such funding efforts as "social engineering." They don't believe art should be used as a tool to change society - for instance, to improve race relations - but should be pursued purely as art. And some long-time community-arts activists question whether the new funding trend is simply a matter of "fashion rather than passion." But Jones defends the project as having grown out of conversations with the local art community and argues: "Why shouldn't art be more a part of our daily life?"

The Boston Foundation fund was launched last month with a $1.2 million seed grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, which also gave $9.5 million in grants to nine other community foundations around the country. According to Holly Sidford, Wallace program director, the grants are part of a trend that has been building to reverse the image of art as an elitist activity. It is being prompted in part by concern among traditional arts groups that their audiences are dwindling.

"Part of making an arts institution vital in the late 20th century is going to be having a very lively role in the community," says Ms. Sidford.

The funding trend coincides with a growing mood among artists who are fed up with the stereotype, fueled by NEA controversies, of their work as controversial and removed from everyday life.

"I think artists are angry about what's happened to them, that they've been painted as villains for the public and not as integrated members of their community," says Joan Jeffri, director of the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Columbia University in New York. In a 1997 survey of more than 2,000 artists, she found a high degree of public participation - including 46 percent who engaged in community service.

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