Arts & Economic Prosperity 6

Change the Conversation About the Arts

Becoming an AEP6 Volunteer with Assembly is a great way to meet new people, show your support for our arts communities and get some great perks!

Volunteers will help with survey prep and on-site survey collection at arts and culture events of all kinds. You’ll also get to:

 

  • Talk with other arts-minded people
  • Advocate for the arts
  • Help others learn about Assembly for the Arts programs
  • Expand your network

Email volunteer@assemblycle.org to sign up and learn more!

What is the study?

Assembly is excited to partner with Americans for the Arts on Arts & Economic Prosperity 6 (AEP6).

AEP6 is an economic impact study of the nation’s nonprofit arts and culture industry. It’s the largest and most inclusive study of its kind ever conducted, with a specific focus on 387 participating communities from across the country.

For the first time ever, this study includes Cuyahoga County as part of the more than two hundred regions surveyed nationwide. View the Press Release.

Nonprofit Partners

Assembly is working with nonprofit organization partners to survey their audiences at arts and culture events of all kinds across the county. These surveys will provide important information on how much people are spending at arts events, what neighborhoods are participating and their investment in and connection to the arts.

Sign Up to Help Distribute SurveysView the Survey Questions

Why is This a big deal for Cuyahoga County?

In short, Economic impact studies like AEP6:

  • Can help organizations like Assembly advocate for more resources for arts and culture, including future funding
  • Illustrate the major economic impact of the arts in our region
  • Influence where tax dollars are invested
  • Help change how people view arts and culture

Download 10 Reasons to Support the Arts in Cleveland.

Download 10 Reasons to Support the Arts in Cuyahoga County.

Thank You

To our friends that have partnered with us on this!

Beck Center for the Arts
CAN Journal
Cleveland Institute of Art
Cleveland Institute of Music
Cleveland Museum of Art
Cleveland Play House
Cleveland Public Theatre
Dance Cleveland
Dancing Wheels
Djapo Cultural Arts Institute
Dobama Theatre
Future Ink Graphics (FIG)
Great Lakes African American Writer’s Conference
Greater Cleveland Urban Film Festival (GCUFF)
Julia De Burgos Cultural Arts Center
Kaiser Gallery
Karamu House
Les Delices
Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (moCa)
Museum of Creative Human Art
Musical Theatre Project
Near West Theatre
Oh Sew Powerful
RidAll Green Partnership
The Cleveland International Film Festival
The Cleveland Orchestra
The International Women’s Air and Space Museum
The Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage
The Rock N Roll Hall of Fame
ThirdSpace Action Lab
Twelve Literary Arts
Western Reserve Historical Society

Get Involved and Become a Partner

AEP6 in Cuyahoga County, can’t be successful without you. Help Assembly reach our goal of 800 surveys for Cuyahoga County and Sign up to become an organizational partner today.  This year QR codes make it even easier to distribute. They have also translated the audience survey into 24 languages! Even surveying ONE of your events makes a difference!

Watch the Webinar to learn more about AEP6 and what you need to know as a partner.

Download Social Media Graphics

Cleveland City Hall atrium with crowd at press conference.

Local & State Advocacy

Championing Public Investment in the Creative Sector:

Our first year of work coincided with one of the worst economic periods for the region’s creative sector because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Assembly mobilized community partners to plead the case for American Rescue Plan Act funds with Cuyahoga County and City of Cleveland government.

Thanks to the advocacy of the Assembly board and the partnership of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture (CAC), Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish and Cuyahoga County Council President Pernel Jones jointly committed to $3.3M in ARPA funds for arts and culture. Approved by Council in July 2022, Assembly and CAC will split the $3.3 million equally and will establish processes to equitably distribute the funds to the for-profit and non-profit creative economy and artists.

During 2021’s Cleveland Mayoral Election, Assembly engaged with candidates to ensure arts and culture was represented in public debates. Assembly also partnered with CAN Journal to launch a candidate survey on their policy vision for arts and culture.

When Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb took office in January 2022, Assembly set out to build relationships with the new mayor and his administration to elevate arts and culture in the public agenda. In the Fall of 2021, Assembly held multiple forums with artist coalitions, creative businesses, and nonprofits to develop a set of arts-informed recommendations for the new administration.  One of our many recommendations was to establish an arts liaison at City Hall to drive a strategic cultural agenda. The Mayor’s Chief Strategy Officer Bradford Davy confirmed that an appointment of an arts leader/liaison will be forthcoming.

Data are vital to demonstrate the creative sector’s impact when we speak with public officials. We partnered with Ohio Citizens for the Arts (OCA) and Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, along with six other regional arts councils, and Bowling Green State University’s Center for Regional Development on a study about the Cleveland creative industry’s economic contribution.

The results were sobering and clear: the creative sector in Cleveland is an economic powerhouse, which generated more than $6.7 billion in economic output in 2019 – and the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the industry, which has yet to rebound.


REVS Cleveland / Akron

Reopen Every Venue Safely – Cleveland Akron

Guidelines and best practices for live music venues in Cleveland/Akron as part of the national Reopen Every Venue Safely (REVS) campaign.

Reopen Every Venue Safely (REVS) Cleveland/Akron

With COVID-19 came the shutdown of many businesses. While most places reopened late spring/early summer, live music venues remained closed. In the midst of COVID-19, live music venues have often been called the first to close and the last to open due to the many concerns around the safety of live music. To work towards reopening local live music venues safely, in May, Cleveland/Akron got involved in the Reopen Every Every Venue Safely (REVS) initiative launched by Music Cities Together. This initiative is focused on helping venues open as safely and as soon as possible by providing best practices and guidelines. The best practices and guidelines you will read below were built from meetings and discussions between Arts Cleveland and local music venue owners and directors, musicians, and public health professionals.

2020

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Data Brief - Dance in Cleveland

Dance In CLE

Economic activity, trends and impacts of dance in Cuyahoga County. 2019
Shri Kalaa Mandir

Cleveland’s dance industry, including both creative and non-creative jobs increased to 302 jobs in 2015. The industry analysis is made up of dance companies and promoters as well as fine arts schools.

2019

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Open Caption

Open Caption

Rethinking Accessibility in Cleveland’s Arts and Culture. 2019.

In 2014, Arts Cleveland began a productive partnership with Art Possible Ohio (APO) and Services for Independent Living (SIL) and began to understand the gap in access for people with disabilities throughout the arts and culture sector.

Fast forward to January 2019, Arts Cleveland received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to execute on a research initiative focused on arts and culture accessibility for people with disabilities in the greater Cleveland region. In close communication with APO and SIL, Arts Cleveland led an assessment of the regional state of access to the arts. Through this research, we explored the Cuyahoga County landscape of arts and culture access and worked to identify and define barriers among individuals with varying abilities.

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Inside the Margins

A Cleveland Literature Industry Study

“Inside the Margins” takes an in-depth look at the role greater Cleveland’s literature industries play in the regional economy. 2018.
Inside the Margins Cover, image of books and paper

Inside the Margins: A Cleveland Literature Industry Study was commissioned by Arts Cleveland—formerly the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture—and is the result of research conducted and analyzed by the Center for Economic Development at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University (CSU). The report on the Cleveland Literature Sector is the fourth in a series of studies that explores the various artistic disciplines in Cuyahoga County.

For the study, the CSU research team acquired the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data for Cuyahoga County from 2005 to 2015, and used the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Standard Occupation Classification definitions. The team also gathered quantitative and qualitative data by conducting an online Survey of Literary Artists, one-on-one interviews and a focus group. The purpose of the data and their analysis is to provide a sense of the local sector’s advantages, challenges and economic impact.

Access the full report by CSU on their website.

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At Its Very Best

At Its Very Best is a commissioned short documentary by local artist, Donald Black Jr. Interviews begin to illustrate the impact of violence and what the arts can do in the lives of those affected by trauma. In partnership with Arts Cleveland, he interviews youth, educators, healthcare providers and public safety experts.

After the 13-minute video was released in December of 2018, Black spoke on his experience creating the video and invited a conversation. Scroll down to watch the full video.

A woman in the audience recalled drawing quite a bit when she was growing up. The arts, she said, kept her and her friends, many of whom lived under the poverty line, out of trouble. As an adult, she was working with a group of kids who were labeled "troubled" or "bad." They were given paintbrushes and asked to paint a mural for a daycare center. She had her doubts that the project would be taken seriously, but something amazing happened. To her surprise, these kids, some from gangs, others from rough areas, and all from different backgrounds worked together on this project with a camaraderie she hadn't seen from them before.

It was a great example of what we are trying to say with the video. While editing the documentary, Black, who was himself defined by his art-making, was continuously listening for something to hit on a very personal level. What stood out, and ultimately became the title, was something said by Toni Starinsky late in the video. She was Black's photography teacher in high school who he describes as "a white person who has really been in the mud.” In her interview, she says, “If arts does anything, it should teach thinking, empathy, and give children hope. That’s what it does at its very best.” Throughout his life, art acted as the counterbalance to what violence did to Black. He didn’t realize at the time that he was healing himself with art because it was happening in a very subconscious way. But the longer he has created art, the more he has realized its impact on his life. “For Starinsky to say that at its very best, art can heal some simple ails, that’s what this is all about.”

As an adult and successful artist, Black wants to be in the neighborhood where he grew up for precisely this reason. He was being pulled in other directions including his life in New York and neighborhoods throughout Cleveland he called “white bubbles,” but he was committed to being present in his own community.

As a kid, Black grew up on the southeast side of Cleveland. From 7th grade on, he had to ride the RTA from his neighborhood to Cleveland School of the Arts, where he was a student. “There was a huge divide between what was going on where I was living and what was happening where I was going.” Black wants to make the community where he grew up a place for people visit to see artwork, and a place for black kids growing up in urban communities to see and experience artwork. His now owns a building on Kinsman. It allows him to be there when people want him, especially young people.

About his murals in the neighborhood that stand roughly 20 or 30 feet tall, Black adds that he wants his little cousin to feel as big and tall as those murals they see themselves in. “Kids say, 'That’s me in the mural.' There are lots of young people showing up,” and he and the art are there when they need him.


Elevating The Influence of Arts and Culture

A Cleveland Playbook

Elevating the Influence of Arts and Culture cover artA history, of the tactics that contributed to successes in the Cleveland, Ohio, area to realize the fuller potential of arts and culture. You’ll also see call-out material with more concrete, universal lessons to help you apply those tactics in a variety of settings. 2018.

This is the story of how the Cuyahoga County arts and culture sector went from fiscal emergency… to securing one of the highest levels of public funding for arts and culture in the country… to becoming recognized as a national leader in creative placemaking. This playbook examines the role and lessons of Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (CPAC) as inspirer, catalyst, advocate, adviser, think tank, policy strategist, data source, convener.

As a result of CPAC’s work:

  • Tax money has been directed for arts and culture
  • Facilities have been built or renovated
  • Governments have become involved
  • Creative businesses have merged or collaborated
  • Innovative cross sector partnerships have emerged

Through CPAC’s process outlined in the playbook, organizations and communities anywhere can see what worked in Northeast Ohio and what did not.  Any one of the strategies in this playbook could be beneficial, depending on a community’s vision and current situation.  It is our hope that our story can provide other organizations with insight into how they might strengthen their own arts and culture sectors and thus their whole communities.

Download

Spiral-bound print copies available by request.


Staging Cleveland

Staging ClevelandStaging Cleveland takes an in-depth look at the role greater Cleveland’s theater industries play in the regional economy. 2017.

The concentration of high-quality theaters and playwrights in the Cleveland region helps to make it a mid-sized city that has a disproportionally high level of national recognition. This is just one of the competitive advantages of Cleveland theater found in “Staging Cleveland: A Theater Industry Study.” The study shares the economic impact and ecosystem of Cuyahoga County’s theater industry.

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Culture Pulse 2017

Culture Pulse

Examines financial trends, such as income and expenses, as well as participation, human resource and space trends. It also compares Cuyahoga County trends with national trends and is informed by a set of three focus groups. Dive deeper into the trends and health of arts and culture as a local asset by viewing both the visually dynamic report, and the full set of data tables. 2017.

Culture Pulse

Cuyahoga County’s nonprofit arts and cultural sector thrives along many dimensions. Throughout our discussions with local arts and cultural nonprofit leaders, we heard a common thread: Cuyahoga County’s arts ecosystem benefits from arts and cultural organizations’ being open to collaborating, the high number of free arts and cultural offerings, and generous public funding. Community members attend small festivals, tour large museums, and take art classes. Artists ranging from local painters to writers to dancers to designers live, work, and share their craft in Northeast Ohio. Creativity is in the water.

DownloadDownload Data Tables