Springboard for the Arts and the Helicon Collaborative have co-developed and released a new report and framework called Creative People Power that begins from the premise that arts and culture are “a renewable natural resource for building communities.”

The project, which consisted of a series of interviews with Springboard staff and board, formal interviews, informal conversations, and focus groups with community leaders and sector leaders both locally and nationally, and a literature review on the history and trends of community development, is driven by two core questions: “How do we understand the value of an ecosystem?” and “What is the infrastructure that enables systems change?”

More a rumination than a research report, Creative People Power posits a sort of “reset” on how we think about creativity and creative people. It advocates for a shift from thinking about “problems to be solved” to thinking about the innate creativity that pervades a system, and how that can be engaged to pursue a community's vision for itself.