Rockford Area Arts Council reveals plan to weave arts ‘into the very fabric of our community’
By Kevin Haas
Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — The Rockford Area Arts Council on Thursday night revealed the city’s first ever cultural plan, which lays out strategies for weaving arts and culture into everything from economic development initiatives to education.
The plan is the culmination of an 18-month process that brought together artists, advocates and community members to identify the region’s strengths and challenges around the arts.
The strategic plan was revealed during a third-story soiree at the new Rockford Public Library, where dozens of attendees contributed to a collaborative painting, listened to The Music Academy Alumni Trio, ate and conversed before the formal presentation.
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The plan itself is centered around four “gears,” which are broad priorities intended to revitalize neighborhoods, celebrate diversity, elevate the arts and create more vibrant and inclusive communities.
Those gears are:
- Inclusivity and Intersectional Collaboration
- Neighborhood and Space Development
- Youth and Arts Education
- Advocacy and Policy
“It’s a strategy, really, that integrates arts and culture into the very fabric of the region, so that creative thinking and doing will lead to community solutions and individual success,” said Mary McNamara Bernsten, executive director of the Rockford Area Arts Council.
She said the strategic action plan intentionally intersects arts and culture with workforce development, education, health care, economic development, local government and private business.
“I believe that arts and culture are the answer to our community’s challenges, and I believe that arts and culture offer endless opportunities for our growth and success,” McNamara Bernsten said.
Mayor Tom McNamara, who called for a future ticket tax on Hard Rock Casino shows to fund arts and cultural initiatives, said if the plan is successful it can address longstanding issues in the city such as crime and educational attainment.
“The arts are a critical component for any growing and thriving community. We must have a growing and thriving arts and cultural sector,” McNamara said.
The mayor noted studies that show students actively engaged in the arts are less likely to commit crime, five times less likely to drop out of high school, two times more likely to graduate college and 78% more likely to vote.
“I want a community, and I believe our citizens deserve a community, that has less crime, that has higher education attainment, that has more citizen engagement and that has a significant, growing and thriving creative class,” McNamara said. “The arts make cities stronger.”
The arts council worked with consulting firm Lord Cultural Resources to develop the plan. Eve Moros Ortega, project lead with Lord Cultural Resources, praised the communities buy-in to investing in the arts and developing the plan.
“It is building on the all of the strengths that you have,” she said. “This plan will elevate that, will amplify it, will push that further.”
The four gears
Each of the four gears are intended to contribute to energizing the arts and positioning culture as an integral part of the city’s municipal responsibility.
Here’s a closer look:
Inclusivity and intersectional collaboration
The plan sets out to foster more inclusive cultural representation, telling the stories through the arts about people of all races and identities in our community.
“It means we’ll embrace our cultural identities through concerts and events that really, truly reflect our whole population,” McNamara Bernsten said. “It means we plan to partner with social service agencies and senior centers and ensure that our most vulnerable have access to cultural resources that are relevant to them and creative enrichment that they can enjoy.”
Neighborhood and space development
The goal is to infuse the arts everywhere, including signage and wayfinding that reflects the character of each neighborhood, “not just special neighborhoods, every neighborhood,” McNamara Bernsten said.
Some examples include the revamp of Davis Park and the placemaking efforts ongoing with developer J. Jeffers & Co. to infuse arts into its redevelopment of the Barber-Colman campus into the Colman Yards loft living community.
“The possibilities at places like Barber-Colman are endless,” McNamara Bernsten said. “We have an abundance of historic properties and adaptive reuse properties in our community.”
Youth and arts education
The plan sets out to increase opportunities for youth involvement in the arts and to integrate arts into multiple aspects of education.
One example that could be built on, McNamara Bernsten said, is the Washington Park summer arts enrichment program that has helped increase students reading scores and reduce the so-called summer slide when students lose some of what they had learned in the school year.
She also said that museums and other institutions could collaborate on themed programming to focus on critical areas of education.
“I really believe that there is power in creative alignment,” she said.
Advocacy and policy
It calls for investment in the region’s cultural identity through dedicated funding sources, policies that elevate the arts and advocacy.
She noted successful efforts to advocate in Springfield for the creation of a Creative Economic Task Force, which will help attract creative businesses to the state, collect and analyze data on the current state of the creative economy, and create a plan to grow the economy through the arts.
What now?
The plan has a variety of timelines for implementing aspects of each gear. Many of the first steps will involve building on existing programs.
“Taking smaller bites out of bigger challenges is the way we’re going to do it,” McNamara Bernsten said.
There are various local organizations tasked with tackling different priorities in the plan. It will be the arts council’s role to continue shepherding that work across the finish line.
“It’s all doable. There are a lot of things that don’t cost money, they cost a will (to do it),” McNamara Bernsten said. “There’s a lot of talent. There are people with these amazing ideas that really just need a vehicle for those ideas, an organization to help them uplift their voice.”
This article is by Kevin Haas. Email him at khaas@rockrivercurrent.com or follow him on X at @KevinMHaas or Instagram @thekevinhaas and Threads @thekevinhaas
