Beyond Grants
Building Collaborations
Local Cultural Councils have the unique ability to serve as a community catalyst for projects and collaborations that may address unmet cultural needs or recognize a potential opportunity. LCCs can also act as a place for local organizations and artists to go to for information about the resources available to their community. This page explores the different roles that LCCs can hold in their community, beyond granting.
Organizing Events & Programming
Through the hard work of their members and other volunteers, some LCCs choose to manage their own events or initiatives. These may include festivals, exhibits, public art and school programs. LCCs can:
- Organize and execute a Council Program using a portion of your their state allocation.
- Use locally raised money to fund events and programming.
- Collaborate with other individuals, LCCs, or organizations to jointly develop a project that would pool resources to ensure its success.
In planning events or programs, take time to consider why the LCC wants to do a certain project and determine if the LCC has the capacity to carry out the event. Collaboration can help ease some of the workload with managing events. Collaborating with others to implement projects can have many positive results:
- The work to plan and implement the program is shared among more people.
- The LCC benefits from the expertise and resources that others bring to the project.
- More people involved in planning often mean better attendance or community support for the program or project.
- Collaborators often have access to other funds; a joint program can be more elaborate or extensive than an LCC can support on its own.
Use your yearly community input process to establish support and identify local interest in a potential project. The process may also help to identify potential partners, volunteers, and untapped resources.
Establishing a relationship with groups or individuals that represent underserved populations can involve people who don’t ordinarily have access to cultural programs. LCC programming and increasing LCC visibility go hand in hand. Read more about visibility and collaboration strategies for ideas about ways to build community while simultaneously informing the public about the LCC’s work.
Serving as a Resource
LCCs can help support the community by connecting cultural organizations and artists to information and services designed to help draw attention to their work. Some of these resources already exist statewide; others, LCCs can develop on their own. For example:
- Encourage performing and teaching artists who are looking for work in the community to create a profile on CreativeGround.org.
- Find/List creative spaces for rent on CreativeGround.org.
- Sponsor workshops on grant writing, program development or marketing and exhibiting the arts.
- Co-sponsor an information booth, brochure, or calendar with the local tourism agency or chamber of commerce.
- Encourage artists and other community members looking for cultural employment to search for everything from internship opportunities to full and part time jobs on HireCulture.org.
- Create a cultural directory: Gathering and sharing information about the cultural resources of the community is a valuable way to increase access to cultural programs and services. Using an inventory-style survey, an LCC can collect information that will help members and others in the community initiate appropriate projects.
To create an inventory, an LCC will need to survey the cultural assets within the community. Resources to survey may include:
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- Facilities (both traditional and nontraditional: art gallery, school auditorium, library meeting room)
- Artists, humanists, organizations working in interpretive sciences (professional and vocational, by discipline) and cultural organizations and groups
- Service organizations with cultural components (i.e., social service agency with an after-school nature or arts camp)
- Education workshops, programs, curriculum materials, in-school and afterschool programs that are culturally based (in the arts, humanities and interpretive sciences)
- CreativeGround.org (New England’s online cultural database)
Working with others within the community can yield more results and make the effort more manageable. Local Cultural Councils could:
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- Collaborate with the local newspaper or social media sites to post a cultural interest survey. Consider a joint survey with the city/town hall or the recreation department to include questions they might ask about future program planning.
- Collaborate with other cultural groups to gather information that will be mutually beneficial. The tasks of coordinating, conducting and completing the survey can also be shared among more people.
Once the LCC has collected information, organize the information into a simple computerized database program and share it with others in the community. A cultural inventory will help to identify needs and assets and will help LCC members make difficult granting decisions. Even when an LCC cannot help an individual or organization by providing funds, they will be able to help people make connections, and through collaboration, exciting cultural projects may still be able to take place.
