Evaluating Progress

Arts Data in the Public Sector

Bloomberg Associates, 2021

Resource Overview

For public sector arts agencies / departments who want to use data to improve their service provision, this guide offers practices from around the country that leverage data to better serve grantees, promote equity in service delivery, and demonstrate the impact of arts and culture.

Creative Placemaking Work in Local Government

Geared towards local government managers, this resource serves as a guidepost for municipal managers towards generating or creating creative placemaking efforts. It addresses creative placemaking’s main tenets while combatting misconceptions. Through an interactive tag system and case studies, readers are able to engage with this resource to understand creative placemaking’s ability to generate opportunity and provide solutions towards equity and community development.

Creative Placemaking: Sparking Development with Arts and Culture

This report explains the benefit creative placemaking confers to developers. It further answers the questions of how developers can plan for and understand the economic incentive for utilizing creative placemaking in their projects.

Overlooked Anchors: Advancing a New Standard of Practice

This report serves as a call to action to the arts sector to propagate equitable local economic growth through the “anchor framework” and describes how the arts sector through creative placemaking can foster community development and local economic growth. Through case studies of arts and culture organizations, it discusses the challenges and potential solutions for engagement with and within anchor institutions.

Creative Placemaking and Community Safety

Through four case studies, this report analyzes how creative placemaking can affect community safety in concrete and abstract ways.

When Artists Break Ground

This handbook guide created by Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC) provides commentary about the unique position arts, creative placemaking, and community development have in rust belt cities. CPAC shares in this handbook 15 themes and practices they developed when working with artists in community development..

Southeast Houston Arts Intiative

This report evaluates the impact of Southeast Houston’s Arts Initiative through four main questions. From 22 interviews and four focus groups, the report examines the challenges the initiative faces and generates lessons for creative placemaking practitioners.

Exploring Our Town

Creative placemaking projects strategically link communities and local governments with artists, designers, and arts organizations to improve quality of life, create a sense of place, and revitalize local economies. This online resource from the NEA of over seventy case studies gives examples from across the nation on how different communities are harnessing the capacity of arts- and culture-based strategies.

Building Beyond Policing

This is a case study of a creative placemaking project that worked with local law enforcement officials to turn an underutilized space into a public amenity and allow for positive engagement between community members and law enforcement officials. The project also incubated local businesses and created local jobs.

Inside Artist Municipal Partnerships Blog Salon

This online resource contains blog posts written by both artists and local government workers who have been involved in municipal artist in residence programs across the US. It contains lessons learned directly from the people involved in the programs.

Empowering Young People to Make Their Place

This report is a case study of a project in Brooklyn that works at the intersection of creative placemaking and public safety. In this project, young people from the community-led most of the planning and implementation processes, which ensured that communication with the community would result in something that they were actually interested in.

Municipal-Artist Partnerships

This online resource is a great guide to the “nuts and bolts” of creating and sustaining partnerships between artists and local government.

Guide for Business Districts to Work with Local Artists

This guide provides strategies for partnerships between artists and business districts to address a wide variety of goals. It outlines the typical steps in creative placemaking project planning and implementation but geared specifically to potential ROIs for business districts.

Field Guide for Creative Placemaking in Parks

This resource answers the question “How does creative placemaking make for better parks?” through interviews and real-world examples. It provides a loose framework for planning and implementing these types of projects.