Community Arts Development in Action - County Galway Community Arts Network.

Community Arts Development in Action

Patrick Overton, Ph.D. Director, Columbia College Center for Community & Cultural Studies

As I listen to people in rural and small communities speak, it is evident from what they say and the intensity in which they are saying it, something is wrong. These people know it is there but they don't understand what it is. They know their community has changed but they can't always identify how. They know they are uncomfortable with the change but they can't put their finger on what it is that bothers them and causes their discomfort. This "values collision" is the presence of a forced choice that leaves them no room to believe what they have always believed.
	This values collision is the contradictory values that have been present in our society since its inception. These are opposing values but present nonetheless. The rural and small communities all across this nation have been places where this collision has been present, but avoided. Rural and small communities have always had an enormous capacity to accommodate and adapt to opposing values because they have found a way to keep them in balance, in check. Unfortunately, this balance has been broken and it has been broken because of forces outside their control. I have come to identify these outside forces as four different collisions. I have seen them in communities all across southern Illinois and the needs assessment verifies their existence.

These collisions are: 1) Process versus product; 2) Sacred versus secular; 3) Individual versus community; and 4) Intolerance versus inclusion.	County Galway Community Arts Network.
	Those of us living in rural and small communities increasingly find ourselves caught in the middle of these four values collisions. We no longer have the luxury of avoiding the discomfort of this conflict because we can't escape the influence of the world outside our community. A great portion of my work at the Center for Community and Cultural Studies is devoted to understanding these "values collisions" and finding ways to overcome them. The fact is, people are not only uncomfortable with what is happening, they are afraid of it, terrified by it, and overwhelmed by it.
M. Scott Peck recently published a book entitled "A World Waiting to Be Born." In it he discusses the loss of "civility" and claims it is time we return to it. While I don't disagree with him, I believe he is really writing about the symptom of a larger problem. I believe the loss of civility is directly related to the increased level of fear in people's lives.	County Galway Community Arts Network
	Our world is falling apart at the seams and we don't know what to do to stop it, let alone fix it. It is centered on what some call the loss of values. I don't think it is the loss of values as much as it is "losing touch" with our values. We have become "untethered" or "disconnected" from them. We have too much coming in, too much happening, too much everything. And it is all happening too fast.
One must admit, the "entertainment trinity" (radio, ielevision, and film), have had a tremendous influence in communicating and expressing cultural values to young people. What isn't happening, and from my perspective, what is the real threat to our way of life in rural and small communities is the fact we aren't communicating our values well enough, if at all, to our children. So, they only have one set of values from which to choose. Few people distinguish between entertainment and art and what some of us believe to be a critical part of the solution, has strangely become tangled up in and considered part of the problem itself.	County Galway Community Arts Network.

We appreciate the Leisure Information Network (LIN). for providing these extracts from their document 'The Arts and Community Development'