Counties meet to discuss the arts as economic drivers

A group of county and local arts leaders from communities of 250,000 or fewer met in Polk County (Des Moines), Iowa in late March for the Creative Counties Training Workshop. They came together to share ideas and learn about strategies to integrate the arts into solutions to local community and economic development challenges — a practice known as creative placemaking.

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NACo's Creative Placemaking Toolkit for Counties

To be invited to attend the workshop, part of NACo’s Creative Counties Placemaking Initiative, counties were asked to form multidisciplinary teams and apply through a competitive process. Haines Borough, Alaska; Pottawattamie County, Iowa; Lafayette Parish, La.; Sullivan County, N.H.; McKinley County, N.M.; Athens County, Ohio; and Iron County, Utah were selected.

Overall, the workshop focused on building collaboration between each local team, as well as the group as a whole, and explored the topics of leadership, data and tools, neighborhood revitalization, funding, mapping assets and social networks, and community engagement and development via facilitated discussion. Attendees were able to directly experience creative placemaking efforts across Polk County through mobile tours of the city of Clive, Iowa’s Public Art Program, Mainframe Studios and the Des Moines Social Club.

In between sessions, teams met to refine their ideas and map out their short-term goals and paths for achieving those goals.

As they strategized action steps, several themes quickly emerged, including: building consensus around community or regional identity; mapping assets and social networks; stakeholder engagement; rebranding; and encouraging local creative entrepreneurship.

McKinley County’s plan is to build an open air cultural center in their courthouse square. To achieve that goal, they plan to develop a culturally relevant business model that leverages and expands successful cultural programming.

This will include:

Identifying key partners and inviting them to help define a value system and core values that will then be used to help shape the business plan
Evaluating the space to determine how to turn the courthouse square into a true cultural center
Creating complimentary cultural and educational programming; and building capacity and interest through the schools and the nightly Indian dances that already take place in the courthouse square throughout the summer.

Once the model is in place, they will then work to improve their internal and external marketing of the programming at the square by rebranding and create local, regional, national and international marketing campaigns.

McKinley County, N.M. Commissioner Bill Lee said, “It is amazing what happens when you have great community leaders around a table to discuss an idea. What we found is that we actually flipped the whole thing on its head, and it evolved into something much bigger and more sustainable than what we could have imagined coming into the process.”

Skyra Rideaux, assistant to the mayor-president of Lafayette Consolidated Government, closed by saying, “We want to go back and find our ‘lighthouses’ — things that will attract people into areas of our community which do not normally see a lot of activity — and bring the people in our community who are already doing place-keeping and place-making to these ‘lighthouses’ to start making our community and culture a true attraction that is representative of every single person that lives in our community.”

NACo launched its Creative Counties Placemaking Initiative last fall in partnership with Americans for the Arts and with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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