Resources

📝 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 Districts: An Introduction For Start-Up Districts

⇢ This Introduction is meant to help potentially interested communities get started with building their Creative District.

📝 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.”

📘🎈 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.

📝 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.

📝 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: 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: 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.

📝🎈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.

📘 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: 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.

📝 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.

📘🎈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: 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.

📝 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 the people of the community are more likely to be sustainable over time, for many reasons.