Art for Our Common Good: Creativity, Health, and Civic Life - Part One

Hosted by Lisa Simms Booth

What role can art play in helping us meet this moment? As communities face growing loneliness, burnout, environmental anxiety, and civic division, the arts can create spaces for healing, connection, and hope.

In part 1 of this podcast, Commonweal Board Member Lisa Simms Booth opens the conversation with Former National Endowment of the Arts Chair Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson and Stanford Arts Director Deborah Cullinan. Together, they explore how creativity can strengthen wellbeing, respond to environmental challenges, and help rebuild trust and participation in public life. Watch or listen to hear their thoughts on how the arts can help solve some of the most urgent challenges of our time by bringing people together, restoring meaning, and imagining new possibilities. Find out more at tns.commonweal.org.

Co-presented with Visual Thinking Strategies, Collaborations: Teachers and Artists, California for the Arts, Flight School, Fordham University Creative Writing Program, Jasper Inclusion Advisors, Kularts, National Organization for Arts in Health, Panta Rhea, Power of Hope, ILALI, Smith Center for Healing and the Arts, Stanford Arts, and University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine. | Artwork credit: “River Braid” by Jon Marro.

***The New School is Commonweal’s learning community and podcast — we offer conversations, workshops, and other events in areas that Commonweal champions: finding meaning, growing health and resilience, advocating for justice, and stewarding the natural world. We make our conversations into podcasts for listeners world wide and have been doing this since 2007. Please like/follow our soundcloud channel for access to our library of more than 400 great podcasts.