Banking on culture: through its small grants program, the inter-American development bank cultural center is investing in projects within the Americas that will yield immeasurable returns.

• Author: Hamilton, Roger

While Latin America's pop stars, painters, and Nobel novelists have turned the region into a cultural superpower, making it a land of arts icons known and loved around the world, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has been sustaining culture--in the broadest sense of the word--in communities throughout the region. It does so with the cultural grants program of the IDB Cultural Center.

Where does this leave Abdon Punzo-Angel? In a dusty, smoky workshop in Michoacan, Mexico, he removes a disc of glowing copper from a charcoal furnace. He lays it on an anvil and begins hammering the metal into what will be an exquisitely proportioned vase.

Punzo-Angel is part of Latin America's cultural tapestry. So is Rosalinda Tay Mendoza, a weaver on the shore of Guatemala's Lake Atitlan, Mario Mejia, a charango maker in Bolivia, and Francisca Nazare de Oliveira, who creates "Amazonian biojewelry" in her tiny house in Brazil's rainforest.

Artist Felix Angel is part of the tapestry as well, but in ways that aren't immediately apparent when you drop by his office in Washington, DC, where he directs the IDB Cultural Center and its cultural grants program. Visitors pass through a gauntlet of security checks then enter a vast atrium where water cascades down a series of marble pools. In the elevator, a group of employees murmur in the language of finance.

Where does the IDB Cultural Center fit in this world of development banking? What does Felix Angel contribute at an institution responsible for lending upwards of US$8 billion annually for economic and social development projects in Latin America and the Caribbean?

When Angel joined the IDB seventeen years ago, most development experts thought of art as something to hang in an executive office. Their job was to finance infrastructure--building roads, water systems, and energy projects. But they soon learned that new societies are not built of concrete and steel alone. People and their ideas, and even their dreams, are just as important. It would only be a matter of time before culture--stripped of its elitist veneer--would take its rightful role in the development matrix. For one thing, culture is jobs. "It is how millions of everyday people across the hemisphere put food on the table and a roof over their heads. It's how they send their children to school," says Angel.

The Cultural Center's grant program was created in 1994 and has evolved and grown since then. In 26 countries of the region, the IDB has partnered with community based institutions and awarded small grants that provide financial support and attest to the hard work and dedication of those institutions.

Culture is the energy and the glue that helps make development possible. By knitting together communities and empowering individuals, culture helps to create the social capital needed to drive economic and social development. "Culture has to do with every aspect of people's lives, with every aspect of society," says Angel, in an interview where he is joined by Elba Agusti, a Cultural Center staff member and the manager of the Cultural Development Program. "This is the theory, but the only way to truly understand how it works is by going to the grassroots, to the...