Community Arts Development
The Community Arts Program assists communities in developing their local arts organizations. The Maine Arts Commission’s Capacity Building program helps local arts organizations with strategic planning, board development, marketing, audience development, staffing issues, and other needs. In 2007. the Commission partnered with the Five Rivers Arts Alliance to organize a conference for local arts organizations, and the conference was followed in 2008 with two workshops on board development and marketing.
The Capacity Building program replaced the previous Discovery Research program, which served Maine Communities through the 1990’s and the early part of this decade. The program allowed communities to conduct cultural inventories to discover the artists in their own back yard. In many cases these projects resulted in printed directories, or web-based directories of local artists. The printed directories are available in the Maine Arts Commission offices, though in many cases there are reference copies only. Assistance with cultural inventories is still available to communities that have not done Discovery Research projects, or may have compelling reasons to revisit their cultural inventories.
