ArtPlace awards the National Creative Placemaking Fund to the Adaawewigamig Business Incubator Project

  In 2017, ArtPlace America selected 23 projects across 18 states and one US territory to receive $8.7 million in funding from its National Creative Placemaking Fund. This further positions the arts and culture as a core sector of comprehensive community planning and development.
“Creative Placemaking seeks the full and robust integration of art and culture into the decisions that define the ebb and flow of community life. These projects embody what this looks like at its most effective. We were overwhelmed by the extraordinary commitment demonstrated in these projects—contributing to the growing understanding of creative placemaking efforts throughout the nation.” - Rip Rapson, President and CEO of The Kresge Foundation, and Chair of ArtPlace America President’s Council.
ArtPlace received 987 applications for this year’s funding cycle, from which 70 finalists were selected. Of the 23 projects, 12 are first-time applicants and one has received funding from ArtPlace before. ArtPlace continues a deep commitment to funding in rural America, with almost 52% of this year’s funded projects working in rural communities.   4-Directions Development is one of the selected applicants with their art, culture and food focus within their business incubator development and renovations. 4-Directions Development will repurpose a former Tribal College on the Red Lake Reservation in Northern Minnesota to house the Adaawe-Wigamig Business Center. The plans for the incubator are to house 4-Directions Development’s offices and staff, as well as 6-8 small businesses, an art gallery, art maker space, stage development for performing artists, a commercial kitchen for healthy food promotion and cooking classes, and a classroom for entrepreneurial, art, and food/ag trainings. The business incubator and creative art placement will provide new economic opportunities for Tribal members, and serve as the heart of the community to attract people (both on and off the Reservation) to participate with socializing, shopping, entertainment and tourism. The National Creative Placemaking Fund is a highly competitive national program that invests money in communities across the country in which artists, arts organizations, and arts and culture activity help drive community development change across 10 sectors of community planning and development: • Agriculture and Food • Economic Development • Education and Youth • Environment and Energy • Health • Housing • Immigration • Public Safety • Transportation • Workforce Development ArtPlace’s National Creative Placemaking Fund has supported 279 creative placemaking projects in 208 communities of all sizes, totaling $86.4 million worth of investments across 46 states, American Samoa, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. Read more about the Adaawewigamig project on our Facebook page! What is ArtPlace? Artplace America is a collaboration among fourteen foundations, eight federal agencies, and six financial institutions dedicated to strengthening the field of creative placemaking. Toward this end, ArtPlace has invested in projects in which artists and arts organization play an explicit and central role in strategies to help shape their communities’ social, physical, and economic futures. Participating foundations include: The Barr Foundation; Bloomberg Philanthropies; Bush Foundation; Max M & Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation; Ford Foundation; James Irvine Foundation; John S & James L. Knight Foundation; Kresge Foundation; McKnight Foundation; William Penn Foundation; Stavros Niarchos Foundation; Surdna Foundation;2 Anonymous Donors; and Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, Inc. (RPA) serving as the Fiscal Sponsor. ArtPlace has four core areas of activity: a national grants program that annually supports creative placemaking projects in communities of all sizes across the country; our Community Development Investments in 6 place-based community planning and development organizations that are working to permanently and sustainably incorporate arts and culture into their core work; field building strategies that work to connect and grow the field of practitioners; and research strategies to understand, document, and disseminate successful creative placemaking practices. ArtPlace believes  that successful creative placemaking projects do four things:
  1. Define a community based in geography, such as a block, a neighborhood, a city, or a region
  2. Articulate a change the group of people living and working in that community would like to see
  3. Propose an arts-based intervention to help achieve that change
  4. Develop a way to know whether the change occurred
In everything that they do and support, arts and culture work to help achieve a place-based change, which means that it is the community development interventions that are creative, not necessarily the outcomes. In creative placemaking, “creative” is an adverb describing the making, not an adjective describing the place. Successful creative placemaking projects are not measured by how many new arts centers, galleries, or cultural districts are built. Rather, their success is measured in the ways artists, formal and informal arts spaces, and creative interventions have contributed toward community outcomes. Source: https://www.artplaceamerica.org/about/introduction