AFC’s Lunch Dialogue with Barry Hessenius and Shannon Daut

On Friday, October 10th, 2014, Arts for Colorado will sponsor a lunch and dialogue with arts policy wonk and blogger Barry Hessenius and Executive Director for the Alaska State Council on the Arts, Shannon Daut.

The event will be held at Paris on the Platte, which is located at 1553 Platte in Denver. Lunch is $10.00 and reservations must be made in advance because space is limited. The event begins at 11:40 a.m. with informal conversation and lunch. The formal program launches at noon and will conclude at 12:30 p.m., followed by 10 minutes of Q and A. The session adjourns at 1:00 p.m.

To reserve a space at this event, please contact Stefan Runstrom via email at Stefan.Runstrom@WESTAF.org or Daniel Aid via telephone at 303-629-1166.

The Program

During the program portion of this event, Barry Hessenius, the editor of Barry’s Blog (blog.westaf.org)will answer questions posed by Alaska State Council on the Arts Executive Director and former Denverite Shannon Daut. Hessenius will answer questions about arts advocacy, blogging for the arts, the current state of the arts, and other questions posed by Daut. Daut will use her broad experience in the arts field to craft and manage a series of questions that are expected to be both provocative and informative.

The Participants

Barry Hessenius is the editor of Barry’s Blog, a blog with a 10,000+ person subscriber base that is widely read in the cultural policy and cultural administration communities. Hessenius served as Director of the California Arts Council from 2000 through 2005. At the Council, he managed an annual $32 million grants pool and supervised a staff of 54. Hessenius previously served as President and CEO of the California Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, a nonprofit statewide service provider for California’s local arts councils. He was also the Executive Director of LINES Ballet in San Francisco. Hessenius has served as a board member of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA), the California Alliance for Arts Education (CAAE), California CultureNet, the California State Summer School for the Arts, the California Travel Industry Association (CalTIA), the San Francisco Architectural Foundation, and served as a member of the State Superintendent’s Task Force on Arts Education. He is the author of Hardball Lobbying for Nonprofits (MacMillan, New York), and has authored several studies including the Arts Advocacy Handbook, the Local Arts Agency Toolkit, and the Local Arts Agency Funding Study (Aspen Institute). Hessenius holds a law degree from the University of California Berkeley and has many years of experience in the commercial music industry.

Shannon Daut currently serves as the Executive Director of the Alaska State Council on the Arts, Alaska’s state arts agency. Daut also serves on the national boards of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters and the National Performance Network. In addition, she was elected by her peer arts agency directors to serve on the board of the Western State Arts Federation (WESTAF). Prior to assuming leadership of Alaska’s state arts agency, Daut served as Deputy Director of WESTAF. In that position, she oversaw work in the areas of cultural policy and technology. She played a leading role in developing several of WESTAF’s successful technology services. In addition to her work with WESTAF, she served on and co-chaired the Create Denver advisory committee. She has been a juror for numerous film festivals and was chair of the Museum of Contemporary Art|Denver’s 2005 Film Biennial. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Communication/Film Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a master’s degree in Communication from the University of Colorado, Denver.

Colorado Creative Industries and the Boettcher Foundation Announce Five Newly Certified Creative Districts

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DENVER – June 26, 2013 – Colorado Creative Industries (CCI), a division of the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade, and the Boettcher Foundation are pleased to announce the certification of five new creative districts through the Colorado Creative Districts Program: Pueblo Creative Corridor, Corazon de Trinidad, North Fork Valley Creative District, Ridgway Creative District and Telluride Creative District.

“These 2013 certified creative districts are great examples of how the arts create exciting places for people to visit and live,” said Gov. Hickenlooper. “These districts not only increase quality of life, they also help with economic vitality of the area and attract people from all over Colorado and the country.”

Initiated in 2011 with the signing of House Bill 11-1031, the Colorado Creative District’s program first certified Denver’s Arts District on Santa Fe and Downtown Salida, with an additional 13 districts granted prospective and emerging status.

“The goal of this program is to help Colorado Creative Districts achieve the administrative structure, funding streams, community engagement process, strategic plan and staff structure that provide both immediate sustainability and opportunities to evolve,” said Margaret Hunt, Director of Colorado Creative Industries.

The second-year grants will provide $15,000 and technical assistance opportunities to each of the five new Certified Creative Districts. They will also be eligible to receive a Boettcher Leadership Award of $10,000.

“The state’s newly designated Creative Districts are capitalizing on Colorado’s creative assets to grow their local economy and to improve the quality of life for their residents,” said Tim Schultz President and Executive Director at the Boettcher Foundation. “We want to help them be successful and sustainable over the long-term and we look forward to the Boettcher Creative District Leadership Awards taking them even further along the road to success.”

About Colorado’s new creative districts:

Pueblo Creative Corridor - 225 artists participate in the Pueblo Creative District whose activities attract 82,570 participants annually. The Packard Foundation has recently invested $50,000 to support more artist work/live spaces in the district in the near future.

Corazon de Trinidad - Trinidad’s creative district includes six pieces of “mystery art”, which appear on several vacant buildings, while the artist remains unknown to the public at large. Mayor Bernadette Baca Gonzalez attributes Trinidad’s certification to “the hard work and united efforts of city staff, local officials, local businesses, area nonprofits and individual residents. Trinidad is now poised to take advantage of yet another economic development tool; one that emphasizes innovation and creativity.”

North Fork Valley Creative District – The North Fork Valley Creative District in the heart of the Western Slope in Delta County encompasses the three towns of Paonia, Hotchkiss and Crawford.

Ridgway Creative District - Home to a thriving arts community encompassing visual, design, performing, textile, culinary, brewing and publishing arts, more than 10% of its 900 residents are artisans.

Telluride Creative District - Creative District Certification acknowledges Telluride’s remarkable accomplishments in the arts over the last 40 years. The Town of Telluride is a 2010 Governor’s Arts Award recipient and engages over 1,600 artists in its Creative District activities that attract over 255,000 participants annually. The Creative District recently spearheaded the Town’s Cultural Master Plan that coordinates and integrates arts and creative activities in local life.

The Creative Industries Division convened a panel of peer experts to review applications submitted by nine districts from the pool of 13 qualified emerging and prospective districts. Submissions were reviewed by panelists using the Colorado Characteristics of Certified Creative Districts and scored using the following criteria: district characteristics, management and planning, community buy-in, and other factors. The next deadline to apply for Creative District Certification is May, 2014.

For more information, please visit www.coloradocreativeindustries.org.

About Colorado Creative Industries  

Colorado’s Creative Industries Division, Colorado’s state arts agency, is a division of the Office of Economic Development and International Trade. Established to capitalize on the immense potential for our creative sector to enhance economic growth in Colorado, the mission of Colorado Creative Industries is to promote, support and expand the creative industries to drive Colorado’s economy, grow jobs and enhance our quality of life.

About the Boettcher Foundation

For almost 75 years the Boettcher Foundation has served the people of Colorado by helping to build community infrastructure through capital grantmaking and investing in young minds through its Scholarship Program. In virtually every community throughout the state, the Foundation has partnered with outstanding nonprofits to make a difference in people’s lives. The Foundation believes that this is what the Boettcher family intended when they gave their wealth to establish the Foundation for the benefit of the citizens of Colorado. For more information, visit www.boettcherfoundation.org.

Help us continue building our statewide network!

One of the main goals of RAN is to build and foster a statewide network of artists, arts organizations, and arts supporters throughout Colorado’s rural communities who face unique challenges that many large cities do not. The website is still in its very early stages, and we are in the process of building it gradually and steadily, but we need your help!

Ideally, we envision this website as a resource for both rural artists and arts organizations, and a sort of portal to facilitate information sharing among the rural arts communities across the state. To this end, we are currently collecting information on organizations, events, practicing artists and any additional helpful resources in your area to be included in the site. If you would like to be a part of this effort and/or be included in our website, please email Leah Horn at leah.horn@westaf.org.

Welcome to our brand new website!

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Just in time for the New Year, we’ve launched our Rural Arts Now website for artists, arts organizations, art lovers, and all of our friends around the state who have been encouraging us to provide this resource.

We hope that the site will serve as a place for you to stay up to date on what is happing in your area and help spread the word about the many talented artists throughout Colorado!