Soon after my arrival at the National Endowment for the Arts, I found a letter on my desk from Baltimore's mayor William Donald Schaefer expressing his eagerness to join the Endowment in demonstrating how a partnership of public and private interests can both support the arts and help rebuild a city. The Endowment could ask for no better example of the benefits of arts advocacy. This booklet shows how it was done. Baltimore's experience has proven that when all segments of a community - citizens, businesses, government and the arts - pull together, the city flourishes. Baltimore is exemplary in its incorporation of the arts into city planning and in its ability to raise funds for the arts. The Endowment's choice of Baltimore as a model of arts advocacy and support is a congratulatory pat on the back and an encouragement to keep up the good work - for Baltimore and for other cities which follow its lead. We are not the only ones who have recognized Baltimore's continuing accomplishment. In 1981, Mayor Schaefer received the U. S. Conference of Mayors' City Livability Award for Support of Urban Arts Efforts.

Baltimore's pursuit of artistic excellence and its determination to become a more livable city are hardly unique in America today. What sets Baltimore apart is that its citizens recognized the simultaneous presence of certain crucial factors - some peculiar to Baltimore, some common to every city - and took advangtage of them to rebuild a city that had been crumbling.

These factors include:

• City government's advocacy of the arts: The mayor is a highly visible arts advocate who supports the arts with budget dollars, key city personnel, and joint ventures with the private sector. The arts are an integral part of city planning.

• Arts Institutions as community leaders: Baltimore's arts institutions provide the initiating energy to the urban renaissance. They are the premier components of the partnership, not merely beneficiaries of it.

• Economic impact of the arts: The arts have gained city-wide recognition as crucial to Baltimore's economic turnaround. Artistic excellence and economic growth are interdependent - benefitting the arts, business, and residential communities.

• Representative Boards of Directors: Arts institutions have restructured their boards to draw on the community's breadth of professional expertise. They have thus improved management techniques, financial planning, and fundraising skills to complement their artistic successes.

• Challenging fundraising goals: The corporate presence on boards has produced high standards of fund-raising achievement. The leverage provided by Arts Endowment Challenge Grants has been especially effective.

• Quality of design: Baltimore has insisted on a consistently high quality of design for the construction and location of its arts and public facilities.

• Public events: Baltimore uses large and small public events to make its downtown areas and neighborhoods come alive - reinforcing the economic and aesthetic impact of the arts.

• Accessibility to art: Both the city and its arts institutions work to ensure that the arts are accessible to everyone. Outreach and audience development programming have complemented urban redevelopment.

• Community balance: Baltimore supporters both its major arts institutions and neighborhood arts activities, thus giving all the arts community-wide financial and political support as well as an enthusiastic audience.
  
  
• Cooperation: Together we can make it work is Baltimore's slogan. The success of one is the success of all.

Though the members of Baltimore's partnership first joined together for sheer survival, they now stay together for more creative reasons. The alliance has replaced sterile coexistence with mutual stimulation - an environment in which the arts, government, business and citizens share their experience ands dreams. While maintaining their own identities, the partners have shared and merged their professional expertise. Their model is not one of compromise in which everyone sacrifices and no one wins, but rather one of cooperative synergy in which success leads to success. Partnership has become a way of life.

CONTENTS
Creative government leadership.
Early city initiatives.
The city invests.
And the city profits.
Neighborhood partners.
Partnership in action.
Business partners.
Arts partners.
Partnership meets the challenge.
Broadening art's scope: from underwriting to ARTSCAPE.
The partnership prospers.

Soon after my arrival at the National Endowment for the Arts, I found a letter on my desk from Baltimore's mayor William Donald Schaefer expressing his eagerness to join the Endowment in demonstrating how a partnership of public and private interests can both support the arts and help rebuild a city. The Endowment could ask for no better example of the benefits of arts advocacy. This booklet shows how it was done.