Origins & Growth
Spirit & Place began in 1996 as the Spirit & Place Festival, emerging from the Project on Religion and Urban Culture—an initiative of The Polis Center at IUPUI (now IU Indianapolis). The project explored how religion and community shape one another in Greater Indianapolis. With support from Butler University, the first festival featured a public conversation between John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Dan Wakefield, alongside eight additional discussions and cultural events.
The annual, multi-day Spirit & Place Festival remains the organization’s cornerstone. Each year, cultural, congregational, and civic organizations—as well as local artists and creatives—come together around a central theme to present exhibits, performances, workshops, and conversations grounded in the arts, humanities, and religion.
Over time, Spirit & Place evolved from a festival-focused initiative into a year-round civic organization, with significant growth and transformation beginning in the 2010s.
In 2013–14, Spirit & Place undertook a community analysis to better understand its role as a potential agent for change. This period also marked the beginning of more intentional work around race, including a 2013 “pitch fest” that invited community-led ideas to improve race relations, supported by a $20,000 award.
These efforts informed a major organizational restructuring in 2015, including the expansion of staff capacity and the development of an explicit anti-racist framework. As its capacity grew, so did its year-round programming, with initiatives such as Gentrify: The Good, Bad, and Ugly (2016, in partnership with Kheprw Institute), Powerful Conversations on Race (2017), Civic Saturday (2018), and The Corona Dialogues (2020). Throughout this work, Spirit & Place has prioritized transparency and accountability, sharing public statements and reports, including its 2021 Equity/Anti-Racism Report.
Art-centered community-building initiatives also emerged during this period through partnerships with Kheprw Institute, Groundwork Indy, and EMC Arts. These efforts focused on supporting individuals returning from incarceration and youth aging out of foster care.
In 2021, Spirit & Place transitioned from a traditional Steering Committee model to Listening Teams—an approach that deepened community input and, in 2025, led to the formation of a Community Advisory Committee. That same period marked the retirement of longtime director Pam Blevins Hinkle and the creation of the Pam Blevins Hinkle Creative Catalyst Fund, which supports festival partners in their creative and capacity-building work.
Administratively, Spirit & Place moved from The Polis Center to the IU Indianapolis School of Liberal Arts in 2020. In 2024, it transitioned to IU Research, securing—for the first time in its history—direct university support for staffing. These shifts reflect a growing institutional commitment to sustaining and expanding Spirit & Place’s work in the community.
Click here to see our 30th anniversary timeline PDF.
Spirit & Place's Values
- PEOPLE-CENTERED: Our work is with and for people and we center those most impacted by injustice.
- CO-CREATIVE: We move beyond collaboration to level hierarchies, blur boundaries, share power and authority, and engage the full range of participant gifts to unleash new insights, expressions, and paths forward.
- GENERATIVE: Our work creates new reflection, knowledge, and/or practice that builds an ecosystem where all can grow.
- ABUNDANT: Believing there is enough to go around, we share knowledge and resources freely, practice reciprocity, promote others and their achievements, and remain open to multiple possibilities.
- GLOCAL: We view challenges within a community organizing framework, which sees social problems as neither local nor global, but interdependent and interconnected.
- EMERGENT: We practice emergence, which means we adapt strategies over time as the initial intention is consistently re-evaluated in response to a changing reality.
- TRANSPARENT & ACCOUNTABLE: We make our intentions, decisions, and processes visible, communicate openly about both progress and challenges, and take responsibility for our impact by inviting feedback, learning publicly, and making changes when needed.
Spirit & Place issued this statement in the summer of 2020 and shares it in full transparency of history and values system.
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Spirit & Place supports the protesters who are demanding an end to police brutality, a biased criminal justice system, and the systemic racism that is killing Black Americans. We see you. We hear you. We grieve with you. We support you.
For 25 years, Spirit & Place has been a community platform for wrestling with challenging questions. In 2015 we turned the questions inward and began an internal journey to dismantle our complicity in upholding institutional racism and white supremacy.
Through the fearless efforts of Black scholars, artists, and community leaders, we have learned valuable lessons. It is through their labor we have been able to invite you along on this journey and we want to acknowledge that.
The work of Dr. Keisha Blain on The Charleston Syllabus is what allowed us to create Powerful Conversations on Race which asked you to confront the history of anti-Black violence and oppression in the United States.
The words and wisdom of artist/activist Killer Mike and the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, asked you to look deeply into America’s past to understand why the American Dream is a myth for many Black people.
Local poet and spoken word artist Manon Voice, IU-Bloomington scholar and poet Dr. Maria Hamilton Abegunde, and author Maurice Broaddus have pushed recent festival events to truly meaningful places by asking us to consider not only the pain of being Black in the U.S., but to recognize and value the beauty, creativity, and wisdom found in the Black experience.
And the work of our exceptional community partners including the Kheprw Institute, Groundwork Indy, MLK Center, and Child Advocates have allowed us to connect you to other opportunities to wrestle with challenging questions.
We will continue on our journey, knowing that we have much more to learn, knowing that we have made mistakes and will make mistakes, and knowing that we are morally compelled to combat a culture of white supremacy and structural racism that has been centuries in the making and that lies at the foundation of American society.
Spirit & Place will continue to create new connections and conversations that center unheard voices, foster new directions, and imagine a thriving future for all people, especially those who continue to suffer under systems of injustice and oppression.
We will use our three civic tools — the arts, humanities, and religion — to do this work. We need the arts to help us shift perspectives, the humanities to help us find connections and patterns between the past and present, and spiritual practices and wisdom that promote healing and build community.
We can’t do this alone and ask you to join us.
Here are a few things to get you started:
Do the work it takes to become an anti-racist by reading more for yourself and the children in your life.
Study the language you’re using.
Actively support changes to police and criminal justice policy.
Support educational reform efforts to incorporate racial justice work into the classroom.
Follow the work of groups like Indy10 Black Lives Matter, the African American Coalition of Indianapolis, and Indy SURJ-Showing Up for Racial Justice.
Support Black-owned businesses and media like The Indianapolis Recorder.
Learn new skills to dismantle institutional and structural racism from organizations like Midwest Academy and Race Forward.
Ask the big questions. Sit with the answers you hear. Get ready for a lot of work. Dismantling the racist systems of this country will not be easy and will not be achieved in a single lifetime. But you can move us closer to a better reality.
Because if not you, then who?
In solidarity,
Pam Blevins Hinkle (former director)
and the Spirit & Place Staff
Spirit & Place
Indiana University – Indianapolis
425 University Blvd., CA 003B
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-274-2462
festival@iu.edu
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