Creative Economy

The creative economy is a powerful engine of growth and community vitality. Together, artists, cultural nonprofits, and creative businesses produce and distribute cultural goods and services that generate jobs, revenue, and quality of life. A thriving cultural sector leads to thriving communities.

NEFA’s creative economy work supports the creative sector and creative placemaking work by highlighting the rich cultural activity of New England, quantifying its impact, connecting its leaders, and providing opportunities for anyone across the U.S. to apply research frameworks or New England model projects locally. These are accomplished through:

Research & Data | Meetings & Events | CreativeGround | Community Initiatives

NEFA's Creative Economy Milestones

NEFA has a history of providing arts organizations with data-driven research to be used for advocacy to their local governments and has become the foundation for local and statewide efforts to build New England’s creative economy.

1978	NEFA starts its economic impact studies of New England's nonprofit cultural sector.
Mid-1990s	NEFA's studies include data from the Internal Revenue Service, revealing that the nonprofit cultural community in New England is a more significant economic force than anyone had yet imagined. Leaders in the region's business, government, cultural, and educational sectors take notice.
1998	The Creative Economy Initiative is formed, bringing together the commercial and nonprofit components of New England's cultural sector.
2000	NEFA partners with the New England Council to define the creative economy and analyze its collective economic impact in The Creative Economy Initiative: The Role of the Arts and Culture in New England's Economic Competitiveness.
2005	NEFA refines long-standing methodology for examining the nonprofit component of the creative economy with New England's Creative Economy: The State of the Public Cultural Sector.
2006	The economic Impact Calculator is added to CultureCount as a pilot project. Users can learn about the input-output economic models that assess economic impact and estimate the economic impact of a single or group of arts/culture nonprofits in Massachusetts.
2007	NEFA updates its 2000 report to offer a reliable, public definition of the occupations and industries of the creative economy in The Creative Economy: A New Definition.
2008	NEFA re-launches the New England Cultural Database (NECD) as CultureCount, the only online comprehensive and consistent data collection resource for New England's creative economy, collected over NEFA's 30-year research history.
2009	Selections of new data are released in New England’s Creative Economy: The Nonprofit Sector, which demonstrates the size and financial statistics of New England's arts and culture nonprofits.
2010	NEFA co-hosts Connecting Creative Communities with the City of Providence Department of Art, Culture + Tourism, a summit where leaders from New England gathered to share strategies for engaging the creative sector and to begin to develop a network of creative communities.
May 2011	NEFA co-hosts the Creative Communities Exchange with Berkshire Creative and establishes Creative Economy awards of $3,500 each to recognize two exemplary creative economy projects in New England.
Sept. 2011	NEFA releases New England's Creative Economy: Nonprofit Sector Impact, the next installment of the report series focusing on economic impact of New England's arts and cultural nonprofits, including organizational examples from each state.
June 2013	NEFA creates the creative economy community initiatives section on their website, which contains exemplary creative placemaking intiatives posted by organizations that leverage local creative assets and cross-sector partnerships for community revitalization and growth. NEFA co-hosts the Creative Communities Exchange (CCX) with Creative Portland and awards two Creative Economy awards to recognize two exemplary creative economy projects in New England.
January 2014	NEFA launches CreativeGround, merging former directories Matchbook.org and CultureCount into an enhanced, comprehensive directory of New England’s creative enterprises and artists.
June 2015	NEFA hosts the fourth Creative Communities Exchange (CCX) with the help of local host, Arts Alive!, in Keene, NH.
June 2017	NEFA releases The Jobs in New England's Creative Economy and Why They Matter. The report shows: New England’s creative economy employs nearly 310,000 people who earn a total of $17 billion per year, New England has a 20% higher prevalence of artists in its employment base compared to the U.S, employment trend data since 2000, the local landscape of creative enterprises, and a survey of artists and creative workers reflecting the realities of work life.
June 2017	NEFA hosts the fifth Creative Communities Exchange (CCX) with the help of local host, the Southeastern Connecticut Cultural Coalition, in New London, CT.
June 2019	NEFA hosts the sixth Creative Communities Exchange (CCX) with the help of local host Montpelier Alive in Montpelier, VT.

Creative Economy Awards

At the Creative Communities Exchange, NEFA's Creative Economy awards - for an organization or for a specific project - are presented in recognition of successful strategies, scope of impact on the creative economy, and possibility for replication in other communities.

Past Creative Economy Award Recipients

2019 Award recipients:

The Steel Yard of Providence, RI: Founded in 2001 as an industrial arts center in the outskirts of Providence, the Steel Yard has grown into a 3.8-acre campus that includes a craft school, a manufacturing studio, and an outdoor community venue. They also bring their inclusive design and public art process to other communities, training local artists and championing fair pay for creative work.
Burlington City Arts of Burlington, VT has evolved from a festival organizer into a crucial city department that keeps the arts at the center of Burlington’s life. BCA was one of the first departments in the nation to be designated as cultural planner, they integrate the arts into planning for economic development, education, and urban design. They have renovated and manage city facilities like Contois Auditorium, Memorial Auditorium, and the Firehouse, now known as the BCA Center. They continue to produce and partner on events large and small, but also manage exhibitions, educational programs, calls for artists, art sales, and other artist resources, including all the public art they help facilitate.
Constelación de Historias, a project of ZUMIX, a youth development, arts, and creative technology organization in East Boston.MA. Constelación de Historias was born out of a need to gather community voices around the crucial issue of gentrification in East Boston. Constelación de Historias used the ZUMIX Radio platform and partnerships with local advocacy groups and youth journalists to produce radio stories and events that gave a voice to local citizens during the City of Boston’s comprehensive planning process for East Boston.

2017 award recipients:

Rhode Island Latino Arts, of Providence, RI, is the leading nonprofit organization exclusively dedicated to the promotion, advancement, development and cultivation of Latino arts, including the art, culture, history and heritage of Rhode Island Latinos.
African Burying Ground Memorial Park, City of Portsmouth, NH: after the unexpected revealing of a more than 300-year old burying ground for African and African-descended people underneath a city street, the City of Portsmouth, NH, closed and transformed the street into an evocative public gathering space to acknowledge its past and to return the site to sacred ground.

2015 award recipients:

Creative Portland of Portland, ME, to recognize the exceptional leadership and work of the organization on behalf of Portland's – and Maine’s – creative economy.
The Square One Initiative is an effort to comprehensively revitalize the commercial corridor of Olneyville, a low-income neighborhood on the west side of Providence, Rhode Island.

2013 award recipients:

Community Supported Art (CSArt) is a collaboration among multiple partners in Cambridge and Somerville, MA. CSArt uses the model of community- supported agriculture to link producers--artists who develop a limited edition of an original work of art--with consumers who want to “buy local.”
Children’s Museum of New Hampshire (CMNH) had been searching for a decade for a larger space when the City of Dover invited the Children’s Museum to renovate and move into a historic armory right in the middle of town.

2011 award recipients:

Contact

Dee Schneidman | Program Director, Research & Creative Economy
dschneidman@nefa.org | 617.951.0010 x530

Funders