10.20.2025

Redesigning the Cultural Districts Initiative

Carolyn Cole, Special Projects Manager

Advancement | Cultural Districts

Our cross-sector task force helped us reimagine how this work can preserve, support, and sustain our Commonwealth communities.

There’s an element of our regular check-ins with Cultural Districts that I wish everyone could experience.

These are spaces where they’re free to talk amongst themselves – exchange ideas and resources, solicit solutions, and lend visibility to their projects and events. Attendees and staff alike inevitably attest to leaving these conversations enthused, inspired, and reinvigorated in their work.

These Cultural District leaders work hard every day to support their city/town and community and, all too often, on a volunteer basis.

More than 10 years into the Cultural Districts Initiative (CDI), we recognized it was important to examine how exactly their state designation as Cultural Districts were supporting them.

Background

There are currently fewer than 20 states administering Arts/Creative/Cultural Districts across the country, with others in development.

Cultural Districts in Massachusetts are a geographical area of a city or town with a concentration of cultural facilities located within it. They beautify and activate cities and towns, and by supporting arts, humanities, and science organizations, these districts attract visitors and entrepreneurs, which in turn helps communities foster their cultural sector and expand their tax base, benefiting everyone.

The strength of our Cultural Districts Initiative – and others like it – lies in strong partnerships with local, regional, and state entities. And while the language authorizing statewide contributions is laid out within CDI’s legislative statute, that commitment has yet to be fully and strategically realized.

Some of our districts are now 13 years old, and like adolescence, these years can be challenging. Turnover at the municipal and local organizational level has been constant and an understanding of the intention of the initiative, or why a state designation was pursued, has sometimes been lost.

When we reached out to our Cultural Districts to inform how we should move forward with revisions to the program, initial feedback told us:

• There has been drifting from the foundational concept of designations being a community and economic development tool.
• The needs of our districts are so unique to their respective communities and distinguishable from each other, there needs to be resources in place to address their local challenges.
• The element of municipal commitment and ownership of this ‘place’ needs to be reinforced and fortified.
• Population growth in our Gateway cities, decline in our rural communities, the demands of housing, transportation inequities, severe impacts of a changing climate, public safety and perception, and the general lack of resources to support our most vulnerable and under-served communities are existential.

We carried these considerations forward as guiding principles in the program redesign.

Redesigning CDI

Mass Cultural Council’s Cultural Districts Initiative is widely recognized as a national and international, award-winning model. That is a testament to the ingenuity and perseverance of those who have developed, administered, and supported the CDI over the years!

Our Cultural Districts play a crucial role in driving local economies, supporting the arts, and fostering community engagement. A state designation should be recognized as a benefit, an investment, a place to channel resources to preserve a community’s cultural identity and strengthen its landscape. It should promote a positive narrative and enhance public perception.

To fully realize the potential of Cultural Districts as tools for economic development, there must be support and alignment of inclusive community development initiatives, state and federal offerings and procedures, and municipal planning efforts.

Internally, the intention of redesigning the CDI was to conduct a deep review of all aspects of the program to ensure the state designation truly drives economic growth through creativity within our districts and their host communities.

It was also – and has always been – important to the Agency to not compromise the accessibility or intention of the program and to make sure our current Cultural District family feels acknowledged and celebrated.

This redesign focused on four primary areas:

• Maximizing the full intent of the program’s enabling statute with a focus on economic development
• A plan to ensure that the districts thrive and are sustainable
• Alignment and partnership with other state agencies and offerings and other municipal financing and economic development tools and options
• Assessing and collecting other areas of support and potential support across the Commonwealth’s government

This was a large task, and we knew it would require the right expertise to do it well. We issued an RFR to identify a consultant with the qualifications and experience to approach this project thoughtfully and with consideration of compliance as well as care for community. We found that, and so much more, with CivicMoxie.

CivicMoxie started off with a close examination of the CDI’s enabling act and a field check-in to assess generally where the program implementation was currently, how it had changed since its inception, and how, or if, the program goals were being successfully met.

They collected feedback and information from CDI contributors and our broader cultural sector. That included:

• Survey responses from our state designated Cultural Districts
• 10 external partner interviews
• Multiple internal staff interviews
• 7 focus groups centering discussions from districts in specific affinity groups from small and rural communities to districts in close partnership with local BIDs

This outreach happened in tandem with the assembly of our cross-sector state agency task force – more on that later – and was highlighted in our recent appearance and presentation at this year’s national CNU33 conference.

“Communities are running on fumes and spunk.”

Early results of this feedback showed us:

• While everyone has a general interest in state partnerships, some encounter challenges envisioning what that could look like, what agencies are relevant, and how to establish those connections.
• Many feel a stronger commitment from municipalities would deepen the districts’ impact.
• There continues to be ongoing confusion between Cultural Districts and other local cultural entities in some cities/towns.
• A general theme of consistent turnover and loss of institutional memory makes it difficult for districts to establish continuity and sustainability.
• There is great excitement over using the strength of numbers in peer and partnership circles to tap into wealth of experiences and knowledge.

There is strong support, both locally and at the state level, for Cultural Districts to be formally mapped on zoning documentation – i.e. requiring district maps be adopted by their municipality and incorporated in GIS layers – ‘making districts real, giving them weight.’

To enhance the impact, sustainability, and effectiveness of the CDI, this feedback pointed us to a shift toward a more structured, professional model of Cultural District operation, both internal and external. The key objectives became administering a more strategic focus on the following areas:

1. Professionalization​ – For Cultural Districts to establish a standardized model with clear governance, funding mechanisms, strategic business goals, and operational structures based on program objectives and identified metrics.​
2. Municipal Buy-in​ – To ensure active local municipal support through financial, staffing, planning and policy commitments.​
3. Mass Cultural Council’s Administrative Role​ – To position our Agency principally as the designator and connector rather than primary, or sole, funder and provider of day-to-day administrative support.​
4. Multi-State Agency and Entity Task Force Partnership – To focus on continued growth and statewide impact through ongoing communication and collaboration.

Advancing CDI

Cross-sector working partnerships are essential to our Agency’s advancement work as we position the arts and culture sector as a visible, recognized resource and an essential partner in problem-solving across the Commonwealth.

Mass Cultural Council is working to leverage resources from outside of our sector, in the areas we have outcomes in, for the benefit of those within the sector so that Massachusetts communities grow stronger.

Through this advancement work and our CDI redesign process, we’re directly addressing the key challenge of limited cross-sector integration, or insufficient collaboration, between the cultural sector and other industries.

The CDI’s statutory language stipulates:

“Executive branch agencies, constitutional offices and quasi-governmental agencies shall identify programs and services that support and enhance the development of cultural districts and ensure that those programs and services are accessible to such districts”.

So, our team assembled a task force – made up of over 24 state and quasi-governmental agencies, offices, and organizations* – and invited them all to assist us in our redesign.

And. They. Showed. Up.

Many were unfamiliar with the CDI, others were unaware of how their work could intersect with that of a state-designated Cultural District, and they came to the table to learn about how we could support each other. It was definitely a shining moment for #TeamMA.

We brought everyone together to have the same conversation but through their different and distinct lens. Participatory task force meetings resulted in direct offline conversations about the potential for creative partnerships that had not previously been explored or pursued.

We identified funding and supportive service programs from within those agencies and highlighted helpful data to inform the relevance of those that can potentially be applied to our districts.

We’re currently working with each task force member and their respective agencies to pursue and support partnerships and policy addressing everything from public safety to housing, zoning, transportation, historic preservation, equity, access, connectivity, health, rural and urban community challenges, commercial and residential displacement, and municipal resource support.

Our conversations have sparked substantial progress in creative problem-solving, and meaningful opportunities. One of the most promising outcomes of this work is that there is significant interest among task force representatives in developing a plan for ongoing collaboration and communication – ensuring we remain connected and united in supporting not only our districts, communities, and municipalities, but our broader sectors.

Conclusion

State designated Cultural Districts hold a unique power to uncover hidden narratives and humanize the built environment. They transform sometimes static infrastructure into vibrant, thriving, communities, embedding and infusing culture, empathy, and meaning into every layer of development. Without the arts, culture, and creativity, cities and towns risk becoming efficient but homogenous; with Cultural Districts, we create places that inspire, resonate and endure.

Given the challenges facing our state and sector, reimaging a Cultural Districts Initiative that preserves the diversity of both urban and rural communities, and that exists to welcome all people, is not a task to be taken on alone.

Each of us is uniquely capable of servicing our sectors and constituents, but only together can we serve the entirety of our state and foster resilient, affordable, and creative communities.

 

I want to offer special thanks to all the participants of our many focus groups, brainstorms, surveys, interviews, and task force meetings who came together and dedicated their time to making this a successfully reimagined program everyone can benefit from.

*Participants in the 2025 CDI Redesign Task Force

CHAPA (Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association)
DSB (Designer Selection Board)
DCAMM (Division of Capital Asset Management & Maintenance)
DCR (Department of Conservation and Recreation)
DPU (Department of Public Utilities)
EEA (Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs)
EOED (Executive Office of Economic Development) – Mass Downtown Initiative & Rural Affairs Office
EOHLC (Executive Office of Housing & Livable Communities)
EPS (Executive Office of Public Safety)
MAPC (Metropolitan Area Planning Council)
MBTA (Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority)
MDAR (Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources)
MMA (Massachusetts Municipal Association)
MOBD (Massachusetts Office of Business Development)
MOTT (Massachusetts Office of Travel & Tourism)
MassDevelopment
MassDOT (Department of Transportation)
MassEcon
Mass Gaming Commission
Mass Growth Capital Corp
Mass Historical Commission
MassINC
NAIOP (Commercial Real Estate Development Assoc)

Advancement | Cultural Districts