February 8, 2007 | Read Time: 2 minutes
NEW BOOKS
The Creative Community Builder’s Handbook: How to Transform Communities Using Local Assets, Arts, and Culture
by Tom Borrup
Arts and culture groups can help revitalize cities and towns by collaborating with residents, social groups, and local institutions, and by taking advantage of the distinctive aspects of a neighborhood’s setting and resources, writes Tom Borrup, a nonprofit consultant and expert in community development.
Creative community building, he explains, “engages the cultural and creative energies inherent in every person and every place” to create a strong, cohesive, vibrant neighborhood.
The first of three sections describes the theory and research behind the idea of using arts groups in redevelopment efforts. The second offers 10 community-development strategies: Five focus on ways that local arts and culture organizations can stimulate economic development, and the other five discuss building a neighborhood — socially and physically — through arts and culture. Each strategy is illustrated with two case studies from around the United States, in urban, suburban, and rural areas alike.
A revitalization project in one North Carolina neighborhood, for example, was able to raise the value of its real estate, employ artists, improve its public spaces, and make the community more desirable “by putting artists and the arts to work”: building model homes and creating a catalog to display and market local handicrafts and artworks.
The chapter describes the setting, the resources available to the community (including libraries, churches, local artists, historical homes, and social clubs), the strategies involved, and the outcomes of the project’s efforts.
The third section provides worksheets for people who want to help spur community development, and includes budgets, meeting agendas, and tips on getting the news media and local government interested in such projects. Mr. Borrup includes a glossary of useful terms and a list of resources in the appendices.
Publisher: Fieldstone Alliance, 60 Plato Boulevard East, Suite 150, St. Paul, Minn. 55107; (800) 274-6024; http://www.fieldstonealliance.org; 280 pages; $34.95; ISBN 0-940069-47-4.
