Bring people together
We build relationships across neighborhoods, cultures, and generations, because collaboration is how we grow.
Policy Approach
Roanoke’s cultural life is carried by many hands. Museums and a symphony downtown, neighborhood organizations, congregations that have hosted cultural events for a century, schools, and several hundred people making things largely on their own. The variety is a strength, but the cost of it is that effort gets duplicated, audiences get missed, and a someone trying to find out what is happening this weekend has nowhere single to look.
The 2011 plan reached this same conclusion. A shared calendar appears roughly ten times in its public input appendix. Fifteen years later it was the single most requested thing in the Plan 26 survey.
Because the City benefits directly when these organizations coordinate, Roanoke will invest in the connective work that no single organization can reasonably carry alone. Roanoke will maintain shared information that residents and organizations can rely on, sustain partnerships between cultural institutions and the neighborhoods, schools, and congregations around them, and work with neighboring localities, where the region’s cultural life does not stop at the city line.
Priority 1: One place to find out what’s happening
Maintain a single, current, public source of information about arts and cultural activity in Roanoke, including the City’s own arts meetings, deadlines, and decisions.
- Establish and maintain one public arts calendar, free to list on and free to use
- Include City arts meetings, grant deadlines, and public comment opportunities
- Publish a directory of local arts organizations, rentable venues, and volunteer opportunities
- Name and fund the organization responsible for keeping it current
Many art organizations are almost invisible… like the League of Roanoke Artists. Need a central repository of information.
Please create a Google Calendar one can sign up for to know about the activities in Roanoke Arts. It’s hard to learn where the meetings happen.
Priority 2: Institutions and neighborhoods in partnership
Sustain long-term partnerships between schools and arts organizations rather than one-off engagements.
- Move school arts partnerships from single visits to sustained, multi-year relationships
- Restore and expand field trips to Roanoke’s arts venues
- Bring working artists into schools for residencies and workshops
- Extend partnerships to early childhood programs and libraries
More school partnerships. We have the kids already, we just need the programs and funding to back it up.
Deliver arts programming through the neighborhood institutions residents already trust.
- Partner with congregations as cultural anchors and programming venues
- Fund community organizers who work inside their own neighborhoods
- Program with libraries as standing arts partners, not occasional hosts
Coordinate arts planning and programming with neighboring localities and higher education institutions.
- Make the case for arts investment to Roanoke Valley governing bodies, not only City Council
- Build standing collaborations with area colleges and universities
- Explore a regional arts council with neighboring localities
- Put arts and culture on the City’s state legislative agenda each year
I would love to see broader arts and cultural representation that includes Roanoke County and surrounding counties, not just the city… A regional approach would encourage shared investment, visibility, and cultural vitality for the entire Roanoke Valley.
Priority 3: The arts sector working as one
Build partnerships between the arts sector and business, hospitality, health, and human-service organizations.
- Establish formal partnerships between the Arts Commission and healthcare providers
- Program arts activity inside healthcare and human-service settings
- Create a business sponsorship program with visible recognition
- Partner with social service agencies to reach residents the arts don’t currently reach
- Involve neighborhood businesses in planning cultural events, not only in sponsoring them
I’d love to see the Roanoke Arts Commission partner with community health organizations.
Enable arts and cultural organizations to share administrative capacity, services, and planning.
- Support shared back-office services among organizations
- Convene the sector regularly rather than only during planning cycles
- Align Parks and Recreation programming with neighborhood arts goals
Competent executive directors and more (forced if necessary) collaboration of all the orgs is how we survive.