Non-profit board chairman Tom Aageson gets creative.
***image1***SFR: As executive director of the Museum of New Mexico Foundation, boasting 7,100 members, and in your role as interim board chairman of the new organization Creative Santa Fe, have you become something of a cultural godfather?
TA
: I'm not going to respond to that, Zane.
OK, I won't call you Don Aageson then. Creative Santa Fe has been contracted by the city to the tune of $50,000 to do what exactly?
The city's economic development plan identifies arts and culture-or "creative"-industries as the number one priority. This creative economy brings $1.1 billion annually and employs 17 percent of our workforce. So, Creative Santa Fe is a non-profit with a mission to strengthen Santa Fe's creative economy and the vision is to be a catalyst for achieving world-wide recognition of Santa Fe, which it already has, but we want to strengthen that as well. It's important because there are a half dozen of these kinds of organizations already in other cities, like Tampa for instance. People are looking at creative industries. What Santa Fe had 20 years ago no one else had and everyone now sees how important it is, so there's real competition.
OK, but what's Creative Santa Fe actually doing? Do you have a plan?
That's precisely what our contract with the city was for. We've just delivered a business plan and strategic agenda to the city and now we're waiting for them to respond. It's a three-year plan. That's about as far as you can go out, strategically.
What's the bottom line as far as how much money and civic leadership is required?
It's both I think. Assuming that we all grasp the incredible importance to our economy that our arts and creative industries contribute, then city and county, state and private sectors really have to work together to capitalize on what we've got here. One recent finding is that we have more arts-related businesses per capita than any other city in the country. So we're ahead of the game, but we won't be if we rest on our laurels.
What's the dollar figure required to pursue Creative Santa Fe's strategy for Santa Fe?
The budget is for $200,000 annually for the three years and the request to the city is $75,000 initially. It's a declining budget, the idea is to go out and raise other grants, private support, membership, fees for services such as workshops, things of that nature.
What are the key action points of the plan?
We're waiting for the city's response before we make the plan public, but the plan is really a synthesis of everything that has come forward in the city's economic development planning, a study funded by the McCune Foundation and several public task force meetings that were held-the plan is really the result of a great deal of community input.
Santa Fe has funded the production of community-sourced economic development strategies before, only to leave the plans sitting on a shelf.
Well, cities do that. Corporations do that. It happens. The question is, what's the point of view of somebody running for mayor? What's the point of view of our councilors? We need to hear more from our leaders, both public and private, that they understand the importance of creative entrepreneurs, of the whole arts and culture industry-they need to show that they know what we have, but that they're concerned about its endurance and they're asking, 'What are we doing about it? How can I help?'
I was just wondering if anyone will hold mayoral and councilor debates regarding economic development and creative industries?
Creative Santa Fe will-I think we should do that. Once all the candidates have announced, we'll give them the plan and let them study it and then see how they respond, probably in January or so.
Why are these ideas coming to the forefront now?
This all really started several years ago in Europe as a reaction against our exports of culture, American music and movies and television-some countries decided all this American stuff was drowning out their own culture and that they had to step forward and really foster and ensure the survival of their own culture. Out of that, the idea of national cultural policies developed. And it was really out of that movement coming together with the work of Richard Florida [author of
The Rise of the Creative Class
] and some others that people began to understand there was an economic component. Florida was primarily concerned with quality of life, but the great economic slice provided through cultural industries has really become clear through, for example, the recent study done at the University of New Mexico documenting the local impact of the creative economy.
When will Santa Feans have a sense of your plan?
People can stay in touch and find out about our progress at
. Hopefully this organization will be one that supports cultural industry and enterprise but I don't know yet all the ways that it will manifest. With the right energy it's just going to be an amazing organization for focusing and improving the extraordinary array of cultural assets we do have. It had better be or why go through the trouble? There's been a huge investment made by the McCune Foundation to provide us the data, both qualitative and quantitative, about the importance of our cultural industries; I don't think any other city anywhere has done a better study, so it would be awful to waste that. I don't think we will.
