In December 2020, ArtPlace America partnered with Common Future to release a new report in the economic development research sector titled “Building Community Wealth: The Role of Arts and Culture in Equitable Economic Development.”

The paper serves as a field scan of Creative Placemaking that summarizes key trends in economic development and outlines several key tenets of community wealth building: democratic decision-making, collective ownership, reparations and justice, prioritizing workers’ wellbeing, non-extractive investing and sustaining valuable resources. The paper then describes six ways that arts and culture advance community wealth building:

• Facilitating collaboration for complex group decision-making.
• Accessing imagination to bring new economic structures into being.
• Building power to strengthen movements that shift local economic conditions.
• Healing individuals and communities from extractive labor and economic practices.
• Making the case for holistic, people-centered financing.
• Creating new and sustaining existing forms of resource generation. 

Case studies of several organizations leading creative community wealth building are also included in the field scan. 

Learn more here.

Download the report here.