Artist-Led Community Outreach

The Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture’s Creative Strategist program places artists in County of Los Angeles departments to develop, promote and implement artist-driven solutions to complex social challenges through arts-based activities that engage creatively with stakeholders. The PLACE Program has embraced this program and works with Creative Strategists to conduct creative, arts-based community outreach to help raise awareness about and increase community support for traffic safety. The goal of this outreach is to increase empathy for vulnerable road users such as seniors, youth and people walking and biking, and support culture change that leads to safer behaviors.

Florence Firestone: 2024--2028

Through a five year, federally funded Safe-Streets-for-All grant, Public Health and Arts and Culture will identify a Creative Strategist to conduct arts-based traffic safety outreach in Florence Firestone and one to two other unincorporated communities. The Creative Strategist will develop a project that may include artistic interventions, approaches, and strategies; community engagement and participation; the identification or mapping of cultural and community assets; the creation of new artworks; and/or access to artistic and cultural experiences to advance traffic safety efforts in this community.

Westmont/West Athens, East LA, and Walnut Park: 2019--2021

Clement Hanami was selected as the PLACE Program’s first Creative Strategist because of his work at the Japanese American National Museum, where he has years of experience communicating effectively about the history of our nation’s internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, and his success in helping change hearts and minds about those terrible events.

Clement’s work focused on the unincorporated communities of Westmont/West Athens, East Los Angeles, and Walnut Park, where he conducted outreach with residents, heard about their experiences with traffic collisions and near misses, and did art projects with them about traffic safety. A major highlight of his residency was a series of workshops with youth and their families at Woodcrest Library on Normandie Ave in Westmont, where children wrote safety messages they wanted to share with drivers. Clement used these to develop temporary and permanent public art works, including a bike rack, billboards, and bus shelter posters, which were installed along Normandie Avenue in Westmont in 2020.