THE PLAN
Since its public kick-off in September 2017, the Creative Edge
team — which includes the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts
Commission and the Sacramento Region Community Foun-
dation — has conducted two town halls, 10 community fo-
rums, 57 discussion groups, 66 interviews, surveys of 1,709
residents, and a sweeping review of the city’s arts and cul-
ture.
“This was an effort to dig deep into the community to
find out a number of things,” says Ulich. “What’s the sup-
port in the city for growing the creative economy? What’s
the status of our arts and culture? And what are the recom-
mendations on how to move forward, to make this a great
city that grows with the arts?”
A telephone survey of 725 residents found that 92 per-
cent considered the arts either “somewhat” or “very import-
ant.” Perhaps more surprisingly, most wanted to put their
money where their mouth is: 73 percent supported an annu-
al citywide tax to support the arts.
To determine the state of Sacramento’s art and culture
sector, the Creative Edge Steering Committee used an ex-
ternal benchmarking metric, the Creative Vitality Index, to
gauge how Sacramento stacks up against other cities. The
score takes into account factors like revenue from cultural
nonprofit organizations, artists’ incomes and the number
of jobs in creative professions like music and photography.
A CVI of 1.0 is the national average; Sacramento scored 1.15,
lagging behind benchmark cities like Austin (2.55), Port-
land (3.06) and Denver (3.52).
To boost the CVI, the plan has six goals:
Goal 1: Support arts education. The Creative Edge plan
notes that 88 percent of Sacramentans “agree on the impor-
tance of arts education, and it is the #1 priority for online
survey participants.” Yet they also found that only 42 per-
cent of children participate in the arts in school. There’s
work to do.
Goal 2: Advance cultural equity. “We have a tendency
to fund the well-oiled machines — the symphonies, the op-
eras, the ballets,” says Ulich. “The smaller organizations
that are serving our diverse population tend to be left out.”
Goal 3: Grow the creative economy, which defines art
more broadly than just the obvious examples of paint-
ings and sculptures. For example, Visit Sacramento only
has one person — actually, a half-time person — work-
ing on a film division. “Filming in Sacramento is some-
thing that’s very top of mind for the city right now,”
says Testa, especially in the wake of the 2017 Sacramen-
to-based film “Lady Bird.” “As an organization, we don’t
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