Isn’t This Why We Need the Cultural Access Fund?

Prosperity Partnership has been arguing that local jurisdictions need a new tool to help them increase access to arts and culture for all residents. Especially in tough economic times like these, it’s harder and harder to fun these activities out of general funds.  But the need for these funds is actually just as big: tourism, the economic impact of these institutions, and the whole “creative economy” thing.

So, on Monday, a bunch of folks protested Bainbridge Island City Hall because of big cuts to the public budget for culture. And there are so many great quotes in here that prove the above point.  I like two:

1) “The city funds are game-changing. It will cost jobs and household incomes.” The cuts will also reduce tourism and the city’s own revenues, she said.

2) Residents were not drawn to Bainbridge by “nice roads,” she said, but because of the “culture and creativity” they found. “(Bainbridge) is not just any other town,” she said. “But if we don’t put money into this, we redefine ourselves as just any other ordinary town.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Speaking of the Creative Economy…

A few weeks ago, Bill liveblogged from the second meeting of the International Regions Benchmarking Consortium that took place in Barcelona. Again, this is a group that was started two years ago by us and the TDA of Greater Seattle as a way to measure our economic performance against that of some of our peers around the world: specifically Barcelona, Stockholm, Helsinki, Munich, Dublin, Vancouver BC, Fukuoka (Japan), Daejon (S Korea), Cape Town and Glasgow.

As part of the conference – which had the theme of “Creativity and Talent in an Urban Environment” – we commissioned a report on talent attraction, the Creative Class approach being one of the most recent and highly touted. And let me just say, the report is awesome.

Remember That Whole Thing About the Creative Economy?

In the go-go days of the mid-2000’s, Richard Florida was king, and the creative economy was going to lead us to cafe-cultured prosperity. Here in the central Puget Sound, not only did we take credit for all our smart people, we actually hired Richard Florida to come and help us develop strategies to capitalize on these resources. But you don’t really hear too much about that these days. What happened to the creative economy?