Resources
Photo Credit: Joe Kusomoto Artocade
Funding
📝 Building Strong Partnerships With Local Government
⇢ Across Colorado, creative districts are working towards a common vision: to ensure that Colorado’s communities become places where the creative industries and their partners thrive and have access to the support, services and opportunities they need to ensure long-term success.
📝 Colorado Creative Industries: Finding and Building Your Market
⇢ Getting people to your district is all about creating a compelling offer and then determining the best way to tell your story so that your audience is drawn in, again and again.
📝 Colorado Creative Industries: Finding Funding
⇢ Money... it is, of course, fundamental to your creative district’s success. But how do you get started in raising funds, where can you look for money and how do you create a sustainable stream of revenue to support a long-term vision?
📝 Organizational and Funding Tools for Creative Districts
⇢ When well structured, creative districts manage to bring together the interests of a diverse group of stakeholders, strengthen a district’s competitive and economic position, and facilitate the growth of financial resources to ensure sustainability over time.
Creativity
⇢ Colorado's Creative Corridor runs through a handful of the state's Certified Creative Districts, including Carbondale, the North Fork Valley, Crested Butte, Ridgeway and Salida — not to mention stunning landscapes, restaurants serving locally sourced menus and the spirit of the arts around every corner.
🖥 Colorado Creative Corridor Offers Travelers a New Creative Lens to Explore Rural Colorado
⇢ A new way to tour Colorado invites travelers to explore five rural destinations as part of a unique itinerary highlighting arts and cultural experiences.
📘 Colorado Creative Districts: An Introduction For Start-Up Districts
⇢ This Introduction is meant to help potentially interested communities get started with building their Creative District.
📘🖼 Colorado Creative Industries: Best Practices Toolkit - Carbondale & Greeley
⇢ This toolkit demonstrates different successful creative arts programing in Carbondale & Greeley.
🖥📘🖼 Creative Placemaking & Expansion of Opportunity
⇢ At its best, Creative Placemaking builds on a community’s cultural assets and leads to healthier places where all people, particularly those from historically marginalized communities, can thrive.
📘 Colorado Creative Industries: Establishing Your Cultural Brand
⇢ Understanding how to take this information and translate it into imagery, words and action is how you get to a successful brand.
⇢ ”Creativity” is not the miraculous road to business growth and affluence that is so abundantly claimed these days. And for the line manager, particularly, it may be more of a millstone than a milestone.
📘🎈The Creativity Lab of Colorado: Flip Chart Activity
⇢ This is a fun, easy (and flexible) activity that can typically be employed at the end of a group meeting as a “culminating activity” to allow attendees to provide input, but it can also be adapted for use at the beginning of a meeting to spur thinking.
📘 The Creativity Lab of Colorado: Five Practices & Ten Commitments Of Effective Leadership
⇢ Effective leaders seek to have constituents embrace a method or system – and – to think and act on their own, to subdue the natural tendencies toward fear of failure to build the confidence to perform at the highest level and for the highest purpose.
📘 The Creativity Lab of Colorado: Sample Vision Statements
⇢ Vision statements come in all shapes and sizes. The best ones are “rallying cries” for change (or desired future states). Some organizations (purposely or otherwise) combine Vision and Mission (a mission is typically how to achieve the vision).
📘🎈The Creativity Lab of Colorado: The Momentum Formula
⇢ A shared vision binds people together and points to the future; authenticity [history, assets, values] embraces the past and connects to the present; vivid description(3Cs) ignites passion and inspires engagement, collaborative leadership propels execution and creates momentum.
📝 Does Competition Make Us More Creative
⇢ Competition can bring out the best in many people in many jobs, but can it make employees more creative? The answer lies in the Goldilocks Zone.
📝 Does Time Pressure Help or Hurt Creativity at Work?
⇢ Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines creativity as the use of imagination, inventiveness, or original ideas to create something.
🖥 How To Put Your Most Creative Ideas Into Action
⇢ You have a powerful brain. It comes up with all sorts of ideas–some of them outlandish, others brilliant, even transformational. Sometimes creative thinking is in an end in itself.
📝 In Pursuit of Everyday Creativity
⇢ This paper suggests that 1) creative behavior of ordinary individuals is likely to become more important to the development of products and services, and 2) future studies should focus on such creative behavior–and related psychological states and environmental contexts–as it happens.
📝 Putting Creativity to Work: The Implementation of Creative Ideas In Organizations
⇢ Ah, creativity. We’ve always known it was desirable stuff, good for kids and poets and so on, but in the last few years creativity has entered that exalted realm of sacred social concepts. Today it ranks with “competitiveness” and “excellence” as one of the ineffable qualities that promises to make us all rich.
🎥 Seth Godin on Why You Need A Home Business
⇢ Seth Godin discusses the importance of the starting a home business and the next revolution in home businesses.
📝 Teaching Creative Districts to Uncover their Past
⇢ It is a guiding principle that certified Creative Districts incorporate their cultural heritage into planning efforts in order to help preserve and promote Colorado’s heritage.
📝 What Happens When Ordinary People Get Creative?
⇢ The topic of creativity tends to conjure conversations about individual geniuses whose artistic or scientific contributions have rocked history. … But who studies the ordinary people, who may not be geniuses but nonetheless contribute creative solutions in their personal and work lives all the time?
🖥 Crested Butte Public Art Tour
⇢ Take a walking (or biking) tour through Crested Butte to view the unique public art throughout the Creative District. By clicking on the link below, you’ll learn about the fascinating history behind each installation as you immerse yourself in Crested Butte’s creativity.
Wayfinding
📘🖼 The Creativity Lab: Signage Resource Guide
⇢ The Resource Guide is intended to serve as an idea book—a reference to spark dialogue and an outline to share insights from industry professionals. Likely the two most valuable components herein are the sample images and the sections entitled “Things to Think About.”
📘🖼 Example: Carbondale Signage
⇢ Carbondale examples of Wayfinding and Signage—how it was created, what it looks like, and where it was placed.
📘🖼 Example: Paonia Signage Summary Booklet
⇢ Central to the success of any signage & wayfinding program is its ability to communicate a memorable, compelling, understandable, and authentic story about place.
🖥 Crested Butte Public Art Tour
⇢ Take a walking (or biking) tour through Crested Butte to view the unique public art throughout the Creative District. By clicking on the link below, you’ll learn about the fascinating history behind each installation as you immerse yourself in Crested Butte’s creativity.
🖼 Creative Placemaking Tips: Crosswalks
⇢ Our first crosswalk was a beta test, so we didn’t have City approval to leave it up long-term. That meant we went looking for a material that would stand up to vehicle traffic but would be cheap and easy to remove.
CYC Video Series
Strategic Planning
📝 Building Strong Partnerships With Local Government
⇢ Across Colorado, creative districts are working towards a common vision: to ensure that Colorado’s communities become places where the creative industries and their partners thrive and have access to the support, services and opportunities they need to ensure long-term success.
📘 Colorado Creative Industries: Creating a Roadmap/Strategies for Success
⇢ The creative district webinar news series, so far, has helped provide guidance on how a district defines its unique and authentic offer, how a cultural brand is built around that and how you communicate both of those things to the appropriate audiences.
📝🎈The Creativity Lab: Prepare a Plan and Make Next Year Your Best Year Ever
⇢ Strategic planning gets a lot of press, but it’s not simply that a business or organization puts a plan on paper that’s important; it’s the process that the plan puts in place.
📝 Engaging Your Community in the Creative District Planning Process: The World Cafe
⇢ Colorado Creative Districts Standards include “community buy-in.”It is CCI’s conviction that those Creative Districts that are supported by the people of the community are more likely to be sustainable over time, for many reasons.
🖥📘🖼 Governance Models for Cultural Districts
⇢ The point was that there are interests… whose perspectives are important to both planning and management, but whose ‘voices’ can be drowned out, by central or local government, or by developers, whose interests are important but should probably not be decisive.
📝🖼 Example: By-Laws Of The North Fork Valley Creative Coalition
⇢ The name of this corporation is the NORTH FORK VALLEY CREATIVE COALITION, INC., hereinafter referred to as the “NFVCC,” a non-profit organization.
📝🖼 Example: Amended and Restated Bylaws of Houston Arts Alliance
⇢ Houston Arts Alliance (HAA) is the local nonprofit arts agency that enhances the city’s quality of life through advancing and investing in the arts and diverse cultural programming.
📘🖼 Example: Breckenridge Creative Arts & Operational Strategic Plan
⇢ To extend and enhance the experience of the ‘recreation’ visitors through creative offerings that differentiate Breckenridge from other recreation destinations.
📘🖼 Example: Breckenridge Creative Arts District Report 2019
⇢ Even with so many early successes, however, the Breckenridge Arts District is still young, and the process of self-assessment and strategic planning is ongoing. In 2017, BCA launched a portfolio of assessment measures that gather data and community feedback to inform strategic decision-making about the district’s programming and operations, with the goals of optimizing the Town’s creative arts assets; attracting visitors to Breckenridge; and building community participation and ownership in the creative arts experience.
📘🖼 Example: Carbondale Creative District Strategic Plan 2015
⇢ Carbondale, Colorado is a small mountain town located in the Rocky Mountains between Aspen and Glen-wood Springs in the Roaring Fork Valley, in Garfield County.
📘🖼 Example: Mancos Creative District Strategic Plan
⇢ Mancos is an example of how a creative district can, through working collaboratively with the entire community, further the economic development of a small, rural Colorado town.
🖥📘🖼 Example: West Colfax Vision 2040 Action Plan
⇢ This document represents the collective efforts of a broad spectrum of stakeholders. The group has dedicated time, expertise, and passion for West Colfax to support the evolution of this historic corridor in a way that aligns with the vision and values of the community.
Marketing
📘 Colorado Creative Industries: Building and Deepening Your Team
⇢ It takes people to make a place really tick, and most creative districts have people involved with a variety of skills and expertise. But it’s how you leverage those individual’s talents and time that can mean the difference between simply existing and big success.
📘 Colorado Creative Industries: Creating a Roadmap/Strategies for Success
⇢ The creative district webinar news series, so far, has helped provide guidance on how a district defines its unique and authentic offer, how a cultural brand is built around that and how you communicate both of those things to the appropriate audiences.
📘 Colorado Creative Industries: Establishing Your Cultural Brand
⇢ We focus on helping creative districts understand how to define and manage their cultural brand and take ownership of that brand through integration into the physical environment, programming and communications.
📘 Colorado Creative Industries: Managing and Measuring Success
⇢ Developing, nurturing and building a successful creative district and putting in place the resources to support it, is no doubt where you’ll be spending most of your energy and resources, particularly in the early years of your development. And that’s only appropriate as you look to establish the district and sew the seeds of success.
📝 Community Engagement and Creative Districts
⇢ In thinking about writing a short paper on the topic of community engagement and the arts, I googled community + engagement + arts and got 47,700,000 hits on March 26, 2016. Any artist or arts organization may wish to learn as much as possible on the topic, for it could be a key to the future of the arts in America.
📝 Community Engagement: A Primer
⇢ Colorado Creative Industries states that 33% of the score of a Creative District that seeks certification from the State of Colorado depends upon the degree of “community buy-in.” What is community buy-in? For purposes of this paper, this term is synonymous with “community engagement.”
📘🖼 Places of Possibility: Public ART & Placemaking Toolkit for Rural Communities
⇢ Congratulations! You live in a rural place. Chances are, you travel to purchase your major supplies or you order some of your goods online. Your local coffeehouse or diner is a central gathering space. You read your local newspaper alongside national news, and you know most of the people who populate the stories.
🖥 Promoting Districts To Tourists
⇢ Tourism is one of the major development strategies communities can use to diversify their economies and improve quality of life. This toolkit is intended to provide a broad overview of tourism and what it can do for your community.
🎥 Rocky Mountain PBS – Arts District: Colorado Creative Corridor
⇢ A cohesive 331-mile travel itinerary now connects the state-certified Creative Districts of Carbondale, Crested Butte, Paonia, Ridgway, and Salida. Plus, how the arts intersect with tourism and local economies.
📘🖼 Example: Carbondale – Why I Create Campaign
⇢ ”I love the beauty and the richness of the land in Carbondale and putting my fingers in the soil every-day— connecting with the land.”
Webinar
🎧 Building and Deepening Your Team
🎧 Collaboration and Community Partnerships
🎧 Creating a Competitive Position for Your Creative District
🎧 Creating a Roadmap/Strategies for Success
🎧 Creative Districts: An Economic Catalyst
🎧 Diversity, Inclusion and Leadership: How to Make Everyone a Part of Your Success