ARTZ PHILADELPHIA

Our primary goal is to create safe, comfortable, and joyful spaces in which people living with dementia and their care partners can freely express themselves without fear of stigma; can discover themselves anew through creative and imaginative outlets; and can find contentment and reward in their daily lives. Secondary goals include bridging the societal gaps of understanding and respect between people living with dementia diagnoses and others in the wider community, in order that we help to create a Greater Philadelphia region that embraces community members living with dementia and their families. And finally, playing a key role in educating our current and future professional caregivers -- doctors, nurses, physical therapists, pharmacists, etc. -- about the experiences of living with dementia and other chronic neurological illnesses and ways in which they can rediscover their patients as people first, people with illnesses only a distant second.

Our strategies for realizing our goals are fundamentally rooted in community partnerships and collaborations. When we facilitate programs in arts and culture venues (such as museums and art centers, currently, and movie theaters and performance halls in the near future), we invite our host venues to embrace the programs and their participants as *their* programs and constituents so that our region begins to build an infrastructure of understanding and valuing those in the community living with dementia. When we facilitate programs in residential care communities and at care centers, we build ongoing relationships with our host venues as a means of ensuring structural integration of our programs and principles into their community life planning. And above all, we cultivate our relationships with our program participants on a personalized basis to ensure that everyone feels in tangible ways that they are valued and respected as individuals.

Our organization is unusually mission-driven. Our Board members not only understand and support our mission, they promote and strengthen it every day through their advocacy and action. Our executive director founded ARTZ Philadelphia and worked with the Board to define and refine our mission and strategic plan to ensure that we are thoughtful and focused in delivering what we promise. Our mission and vision statements were updated in 2020 to more explicitly reflect our existing commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in all that we do.

Our organization -- from Board Chair to full-time staff to part-time contract program facilitators to volunteers -- is passionate about and dedicated to practicing as well as preaching.

Our challenges lie in funding and staffing our programs sufficiently to be able to meet the current community demand for them; and to expand as our region's needs inevitably expand with the startling increase in the incidence of dementia. But the framework is in place and is strong. Our new draft strategic plan, crafted during and in response to the sobering national events and experiences of 2020 and 2021, is both aspirational and exacting, with ambitious benchmarks that emphasize responsible growth.

In our first six years, we expanded from a single museum program and a single program inside a residential care community to four museum and art center programs each month and as many as twelve monthly programs inside care communities. We went from reaching an annual average of 100 people to being able to touch the lives of as many as 2000 people living with dementia and their families.

In 2018, we launched ARTZ in the Neighborhood, a grant-funded project dedicated to creating neighborhood-specific, culturally-sensitive and -responsive community-directed programs for people living with dementia and their care partners. Our first two neighborhood sites for the project have been the majority-Spanish-speaking neighborhood of Hunting Park and the majority Black neighborhoods of Northwest Philadelphia. Our project timeline has experienced a nearly two-year disruption due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, our hope is to have co-created with our community advisors sustainable programs facilitated by neighborhood residents and artists and administered with oversight by a community advisory group in each area by 2024. We intend to take the lessons learned to new neighborhoods; to expand over time the number and diversity of neighborhoods engaged through this process; and to define a new model of community- and stakeholder-directed best practices for developing programs for people living with dementia.

In 2020 and 2021, as a result of the global shutdowns cause by the coronavirus pandemic, our in-person programming profile shifted to exclusively online. When we return to in-person programming in 2022, we will be hybrid in our programs, projects and initiatives, sustaining online programming with a national reach even as we return to Philadelphia-based programs and initiatives driven by individual, neighborhood and community experiences.