The Tipping Point

The Maine Arts Commission has launched a new initiative called Creative Communities = Economic Development, which makes “substantial awards to communities that will allow cultural organizations to become strong partners in their communities’ development, leveraging collaboration between cultural, municipal and economic development interests.” Executive Director Donna McNeil says she was “tremendously inspired” by the Foundation’s Heart & Soul work in Maine (and by Bill Roper’s talk last year at the Friends of Midcoast Maine’s annual meeting). McNeil wants to give the arts and culture sector a voice in larger community economic development planning, where they are usually undervalued or overlooked.

The project will help put the State’s Quality of Place Initiative into action, “putting your money where your mouth is,” so to speak, by offering two $50,000 grants to Maine cultural organizations in partnership with a municipality. Successful applicants, “should be on the precipice of redevelopment with culture as a central player and demonstrate that these funds will function as a ‘tipping point.’” Other criteria include a commitment of leadership, collaboration, and public engagement, including youth.

Nineteen applicants submitted letters of interest by the March 2010 deadline, and a smaller pool will be invited to submit full applications for the fall. Interest came from small towns and remote regions, as well as Maine’s larger cities. Proposal ideas ranged from cultural district planning to the development of live/work spaces, from business skills for artists to branding and marketing.

The more I learned about these initiatives, the more I was struck by how far we have come—“we” being planners, government, cultural organizations, foundations, civic leaders, etc.—in acknowledging the arts as an economic engine. It’s practically a given to say that arts and culture are essential characteristics of, not just Maine’s, but many communities’ particular sense of place. The real innovation here is the action the Maine Arts Commission has taken through their Community Arts Program to encourage, even incentivize, cultural-municipal-economic development partnerships as lynchpin catalysts for unprecedented change.

On a side note, one of my favorite examples of integrating art and community development is the work that Obie-winning playwright Marty Pottenger is doing for the City of Portland, Maine. Marty became a resident poet in the Police Department to help improve morale and relations between the police and the community. Using “police poetry” and other unique expressions of police work, Marty has helped the cops tell their story. Here’s an excerpt from the Art at Work website:

“It’s probably accurate to say that people rarely put the idea of police anywhere near the idea of poetry. They seem so very different—one internal, the other external; one private, the other quite public; one demanding a flexibility and openness, the other about force and control. But both rely on observation. Both require risk and an intuitive trust in one’s own judgment. And both demand courage, the kind needed to head into a scary place—metaphoric or actual—and not turn back.”

As Acting Police Chief Joe Loughlin, PPD, put it, “We had no idea the outcome would be this outstanding. The photographs in the hallways, reading poems at roll calls—it’s brought us a different sense of who we are and whet we do. It’s changed a lot of minds about the police and about poetry.”

Just how successful the Maine Arts Commission program will be in changing minds and building new alliances remains to be seen. But I am guessing that in the next few years, funders will have good reason to invest in this interdisciplinary approach to economic development that preserves a community’s unique qualities and their long-term manifestation.