Sinclair360

African drumming, dancing and chanting enlivened Sinclair Community College one April evening, as the Waconga Dance Company took to the stage. The Pittsburgh-based dance company made a stop at Sinclair for a lecture and dance master class, as part of the event series known as Culture Builds Community. The cultural program is part of Cityfolk, a nonprofit arts organization that presents traditional and ethnic performing arts in Dayton.

As a supporter of Culture Builds Community, Sinclair is reaping the benefits. A few years ago, Sinclair decided to make a concentrated effort to how it approached its relationship with the arts. No longer did the college want to just write checks; the leaders wanted to see true working partnerships.

And when the college was looking for ways to merge its support for the arts with an educational component, the Culture Builds Community program arose as a smart fit. They have similar goals, such as access and educational enrichment. “We found that very attractive, because clearly our mission is one of access, and this achieves our access mission in a different way: We can help community members who otherwise wouldn’t have that opportunity to have access to multicultural arts experiences,” Rebecca Butler, senior director of marketing for Sinclair, said.

Through the program Cityfolk brings artists from across America and around the world into churches, community centers, senior homes, schools and public places in neighborhoods throughout Dayton, in an effort to use the arts and culture as tools for building community. Artists associated with the program have also stopped by Sinclair.

During their performance Waconga Dance Company members invited students and faculty onstage to participate in the dance. Later everyone joined together in a traditional Swahili chant.

“We have a commitment to the arts in this community – not only in terms of producing fine- and performing-arts graduates, but because as a community employer we realize how important the arts are in the community,” Butler said. “For a city our size, we have a phenomenal arts base.” She concluded, “In some ways it just makes sense to bring our two communities together.”

By Tracy Staley

Tracy Staley is a Dayton-based writer whose work has appeared in the Dayton Business Journal, the Nashville Business Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader, among others.