arts & business council

MetLife Foundation National Arts Forums Series

Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund
Atlanta, Georgia

Strategic Alliances for the Arts: Resource Sharing to Build Creative Economies
05/03/2004

Moderator: Lisa Cremin, Director, Metropolitan Atlanta Arts Fund, Atlanta, GA

Panelists:

• Jeanne Folley Butler, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Arts & Culture in Washington, DC and Special Consultant for Partnerships in the Arts and A+ Schools Program, University of
• Jo Ann Haden-Miller, Director of Cultural Tourism, Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau, Atlanta, GA
• Dr. Bruce A. Seaman, Associate Professor of Economics, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA

Program Summary
The "Resource Sharing to Build Creative Economies" forum examined principles associated with rural and urban strategies to grow cultural economies. Butler described the role of the Kenan Institute in lining up partners and funding for an initiative entitled "Building Creative Economies: the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Sustainable Development in Appalachia." The pivot point for the project was an April 2002 conference in Asheville, NC, out of which came a slate of published policy recommendations applicable to urban and rural settings:

• Identify and conserve cultural traditions through fieldwork.
• Conduct asset-based community planning.
• Build coalitions.
• Plan appropriate scale to fit pertinent lifestyles.
• Market effectively.
• Build local leadership and community capacity.
• Integrate the arts into community economic development plans.
• Assemble funding.
• Create arts-based business incubators.
• Stimulate cultural heritage tourism.

The Kenan Institute came to be the advocate and the banker for the concept of helping economies become stronger through the art.

HandMade in America, created in 1996 to bring attention to how the making and selling of crafts can contribute to overall community economic goals, was also an integral player in developing the movement. Its own study had shown that the crafts community in 26 western North Carolina counties contributed $122 million to the region—four times that of burley tobacco. Of the crafts sold, 62 percent were purchased by tourists.

The movement and its conference attracted the participation of artists, tourism organizations, economic development representatives, chambers of commerce, craft-based entrepreneurs, Forest Service, Extension Service, and other government agencies. The process itself of creating the conference generated a level of intense interest in the ARC region so that when it was convened, far more people showed up than could be accommodated.

The idea that the arts and crafts are, or can be, a stimulant for economic development, deserving multiple sources of policy, financial and institutional support, has been widely endorsed by subsequent actions in a number of states and communities. West Virginia commissioned its own economic impact study to measure the value of the crafts industry. At the federal level, the topic continues to be an active agenda item for the NEA and new partnerships have been developed at the state and level.

Paralleling the work of the Kenan institute in the rural development of an arts economy, Haden-Miller said that the movement to highlight the arts as incentives for increased tourism, particularly in urban centers, grew from a White House Conference on "Cultural Tourism in the U.S." in the early 1990s. Expanding on this movement the Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau  incorporated ideas from Shelton Stanfill, who recently moved from the Music Center of Los Angeles County to Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center. Atlanta launched a program to adopt the arts as a tourist-attraction strategy and began convening Atlanta meetings on the subject:

• Community meetings, attended by large numbers of interested arts organizations.
• A task force of arts leaders.
• A fundraising effort to gather support for staff and promotion

The region’s travel industry embraced Atlanta’s cultural amenities as important aspects of larger economic development plans tied to attracting more visitors to Atlanta and encouraging them to stay longer. The tangible benefits that flow from tourism dollars are important to both economic sectors.

In his remarks regarding economic impacts, Seaman said that economic impact studies—often used to justify arts support—are fraught with a tangle of unresolved issues. He contended that it is "ironic in a way to convince arts organizations to be more businesslike" when they are not businesses in the traditional sense.

As issues pertaining to economic impact studies, Seaman cited an impulse to exaggerate the numbers, a failure in taking into account how monies are moved around, that it is not always clear that the lack of something, such as a Super Bowl or the arts, automatically means fewer jobs and less money in the economy. Instead, a central question associated with such studies should be: "What is lost if it is gone?" Seaman contended that the arts "have been dragged into this (the economic impact study justification) syndrome."

All three forum speakers referred to leadership, risk taking, thinking outside the box, and the need for constant and clear communications as being among universal issues associated with organizing the arts as leverage for economic development in rural and urban settings.