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  • From: Sally Greene <sgreene AT townofchapelhill.org>
  • To: "chpac-staff AT lists.ibiblio.org" <chpac-staff AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Chpac-staff] Cultural arts and revised Council goals
  • Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2016 13:59:56 +0000

Dear all,

I look forward to Wednesday’s meeting. Sorry to see the Hargraves listening
session cancelled, but look forward to it when it happens.

At a recent work session, the Council had a conversation about revising its
goals for the coming two years. We have not formally adopted them, but we
will soon. I wanted you all to note that a new goal, under the 2020 category
of “Create a place for everyone,” will be:

“Leverage partnerships to increase cultural arts opportunities to enhance
civic engagement.”

In advocating for this specific policy goal, for which there was broad
support among my colleagues, I referenced the move that Smart Growth America
has just made in hiring into a new position of director of arts and culture:

http://www.smartgrowthamerica.org/2016/03/24/smart-growth-america-and-transportation-for-america-welcome-a-new-director-of-arts-culture/

I particularly emphasized this passage:

"Investing time and money into the arts and culture has an economic payoff,
but it also has an important civic function: it builds resilience in
communities. Research shows that demographically diverse neighborhoods are
more civically healthy than homogenous neighborhoods. The arts and culture
help build bridges between diverse neighbors, increasing participation in
everything from voting and volunteering to work on community projects. To put
it simply, the arts and culture help neighbors get to know and trust one
another.”

In other words, without detracting or subtracting from current/future efforts
to promote, support, enact and perform the arts in the ways that we have been
doing (which we often cite for the “economic payoff” in terms of tourism,
also economic returns to the artists, etc.), this proposed policy goal would
expand that mandate to include supporting cultural arts programming as a
civic value.

Essential to making that component of our arts planning work, in my opinion,
is strengthening the bonds of collaboration among existing cultural arts
activities: hence the connection to the Jackson Center/Hargraves/Northside is
a great step. There are also the existing youth/teen activities, which were a
particular interest of Mayor Kleinschmidt’s, and about which I need to learn
more. (The Youth Community Project’s youth artist silent auction at the
ArtsCenter a couple of weeks ago was fabulous.)

The benefits of coordination were obvious, and critical, recently in
Baltimore, as the very interesting story below demonstrates. Without an
existing network, it would have been impossible to mobilize the way they did
in a time of crisis. We surely hope never to see a crisis like the one that
happened in Baltimore, but the message is that the arts network is a critical
element in the fabric of community—at least, it should be.

http://blog.americansforthearts.org/2016/04/15/serving-communities-stewarding-public-investment-in-the-arts

That article is from the blog of American for the Arts, which is a strong
advocate of this type of community work. I was hoping to go to the conference
in June, but turned out to have a conflict. I understand Steve will be going
to represent us, and that’s great. Looking forward to talking with him about
what he can bring back to us from that experience.

See you all tomorrow, and thanks for all you do,
Sally






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