FEATURED PROGRAM

HEALING THROUGH MUSICALITY IN PARKS:

SINGING NOOKS AS A SOCIAL INNOVATION IN URBAN PLANNING

Musicality can be incorporated into urban planning to broadly improve overall accessibility of parks while addressing public health concerns such as unresolved grief, loneliness, and mental health issues. In particular, new infrastructural design such as Singing Nooks, when integrated with urban planning can foster numerous kinds of new community-led partnerships, volunteer activity, and philanthropic approaches to address the alarming rise in Prolonged Grief Disorders and the negative health impacts that are anticipated to ensue from COVID-related bereavements. The Singing Nook at Willow Creek Park, viewed as a first pilot in Iowa City, allows other communities to reimagine park spaces and related cross-sector community partnership programs in their own neighborhoods, whether in Iowa or elsewhere.

CARTHA founder Usha Balakrishnan, along with three dozen collaborators (including CARTHA Ambassadors Trevor Harvey and Jerry Anthony) hosted brainstorming around this topic in four hour-long Collaborative Doer Workshops on Zoom in January and February 2022. Socialization of our diverse singing memories is our Collaborative Doing activity aiming for positive community health impacts.

In addition to outreach presentations (to Leadership Iowa Program Alumni and Current Class; Rotary Clubs and District Conference; Community Leadership Program; and university courses), CARTHA began to sponsor field trips and musically-diverse gatherings at the Singing Nook and other parks. Actual program implementation experiences with school-aged children (including at Neighborhood Centers of Johnson County); and with persons with disabilities, accompanied by their caregivers (ranging in age from 7 years old to 50 years old at the Rotary Music Park at Camp Courageous in Monticello, Iowa) were featured in the Humanities Iowa January 2023 Voices from the Prairie Newsletter and at the October 2022 Aspirations Gathering