Economic development leaders and the arts community in Brown County are focused on efforts that will help build and highlight arts businesses throughout the area.
The new organization Arts and Culture Brown County (ACBC) is launching a comprehensive directory of the arts sector, as well as a job board, funding opportunities and other useful resources for those who work in the industry, says Kelli Strickland, executive and artistic director for The Weidner Center.
ACBC’s three-month launch strategy started this fall and will include a new website.
“We’re creating a central hub for connection, visibility and resources,” Strickland says.
The directory aims to harness the full spectrum of arts and culture, including artists, organizations and cultural partners alike. “We are moving forward slowly but intentionally, ensuring a strong and sustainable foundation that will serve the community for years to come,” she says.
The work is the latest among efforts that began several years ago to find ways to strengthen the sector at large, Strickland says.
The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies shows that Wisconsin ranks near last in the country for spending per person on arts and culture funding ($0.18 per person). That’s compared with Minnesota’s $10.07 per person, which was second in the nation behind Hawaii.
“I think we have a lot of great stuff here now, and it continues to grow, but people don’t always understand how important arts and culture is to a community,” says Lisa Jossart, vice president of economic development for the Greater Green Bay Chamber. “And both downtown organizations have done a good job of facilitating that from an attraction perspective. People want to live in communities where those things happen and they’re available. So we have to continue to nurture that and support that, whatever it looks like.”
Leaders had some benchmark data on the economic impact of the creative sector because of an assessment completed in 2022 by the organization Americans for the Arts, which conducted an arts and economic prosperity study (AEP6), in partnership with the former Bay Area Arts and Culture Alliance (BAACA).
“I think in general the creative sector is really underestimated in terms of its economic impact because we tend to be limited to heads-in-beds in our measurement of sports and entertainment,” Strickland says. “But arts and culture has a tremendous local tourism impact.”
The AEP6 study found that spending by both the Greater Green Bay Area’s nonprofit arts and culture organizations and their audiences totaled $49.8 million in fiscal year 2022, with audiences alone spending about $27 million.
About the same time, the county was conducting its own strategic assessment of the creative sector in Brown County, called Spark GGB. That effort was funded by community partners including BAACA, the Greater Green Bay Chamber, the city of Green Bay, the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the Greater Green Bay Community Foundation.
The Spark GGB study took into account more business models, including for-profit creative businesses, entrepreneurial artists and freelancing gig artists, Strickland says.
Spark GGB aimed to develop “a shared vision and vocabulary for the role of arts and culture to identify all of our arts and culture assets to build on existing community plans,” Strickland says. It also offered recommendations for a funding structure and marketing to support the arts in the future, as well as overall recommendations for building the creative ecosystem within the county.
Over 11 months, “we solicited input from over 2,000 individuals in the Greater Green Bay area. And that included 40 community interviews, eight focus groups in town halls, and 1,400 survey responses … that’s not just input from the creative sector, it’s also input from the business sector, from the education sector and from community groups.”
One of the key recommendations from Spark GGB was the need for a unifying organization, so the former BAACA has essentially rebranded and evolved into ACBC.
In the last few years, the number of organizations dedicated to creative sector work has doubled, Strickland says.
“The arts are a very powerful way of bringing people together, and building these really important tools of empathy and connectedness, and especially in children’s social-emotional learning,” Strickland says. “So I think it’s just a very useful tool for the world right now. And I think that that, too, plays a part in just the rapid growth and especially in small organizations that are dedicated to creative work.”Â
