Creative City Chico
We invite the community join us for a "Creative City Conversation" where we will share data we've gathered and ask what makes a community a vibrant home for arts and culture. Everyone and anyone is welcome.
Please register here for one or more upcoming Creative City Conversations; your ideas and thoughts are important to the process! You will be emailed a Creative City Conversations Packet a few days before your session.
In March 2020, with the support of the City of Chico and Chico State, a team began the CreativeCity Chico project to develop a Cultural Plan for the City of Chico. We used this Cultural Planning Toolkit from British Columbia, Canada to help guide our strategic planning. The goal of the project is to gather as much data and information from community members as possible, and with their help, map the cultural assets of Chico and craft a Cultural Plan for our community
Discovery: Analyzing our Cultural Assets
In July, the CreativeCity Chico team held six roundtable discussions with 49 participants including artists, arts organization leaders, and community members to discuss the state of the arts and a vision for the arts in Chico. What came out of these meetings were themes: common observations and ideas across all meetings and gems: viewpoints that although did not emerge in every discussion, garnered agreement and support in the meeting and among team members. The first report was compiled in fall 2020, following these roundtables.
In November 2020, the CreativeCity Chico project conducted surveys of organizations, businesses, and community members to gather data on Chico's cultural assets and build upon the early themes and gems.
Compiling Data: Chico and other communities
In August 2021, Chico State’s office of University Public Engagement contracted with Southern Methodist University to compile Arts Vibrancy Datato use their Arts Vibrancy Index research as a metric to assess where Chico is currently and as a tool to compare Chico to peer and aspirational communities. The following is from the SMU DataArts report Arts Vibrancy and Data Comparisons, Prepared for California State University, Chico, August 2021. The complete report is available here.
Next Steps: Developing a strategy with our partners
The next phase of this project will be conducting additional Roundtables/Working Groups to share data and to work with small groups to develop a vision, strategies, and structures for Chico.