Sometimes you can just feel it.
You can’t always describe it or measure it or explain it. But you feel it and that is enough. We are feeling it right now for Akron’s arts and culture scene. Over the course of the past year, we’ve had many touch points with the community around arts. We released research findings in conjunction with our partners at Knight Foundation. We spurred conversation – some enthusiastic, some questioning, some critical.
We met talented, energized new people – lots of them! We learned things about some of our long-time arts friends that we had never imagined. We watched as groups came together, ideas bubbled up, connections formed where there were none before. We marveled at the diversity and energy that is Akron.
While it’s exciting to have hit a vein of community enthusiasm, we know much work lies ahead. The community is rallying to strengthen, uplift, build on, and celebrate its arts assets. Real work is happening around the development of an online centralized communications tool that will collect, in one dynamic place, the vast breadth of arts and cultural activity going on here. People from the arts world and the business world are hard at work examining their overlap, devising ways they can support one another more meaningfully. Many arts organizations are building their financial stewardship muscle and shaping the community’s broader arts story by capturing their data in the Cultural Data Project platform. This is the very data that will reveal the impact of arts and culture to our community and to the world.
In short, it is an exciting time to be an arts lover in Akron. We invite you to add your voice to the chorus. What can we, as a community, do – what can you do – to enhance the arts assets that make Akron a distinctive place?