City’s Comprehensive Arts Strategy released today

Nearly a year in the making, the City of St. Petersburg’s Comprehensive Arts Strategy – a planning initiative intended to ensure the future success of the arts, as an essential element in the city’s growth – will be officially made available today.

Produced in conjunction with the Downtown Partnership and the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance, the 24-page document consists of a four-point plan to “build on the existing ecosystem of performance and visual arts.”

The full document will be available at 5 p.m. on the Downtown Partnership website.

The first point is Enhanced Collaboration. “One thing this city really has going for it is a collaborative spirit,” said Downtown Partnership CEO Jason Mathis. “How do we enhance that? We’ve got a bunch of tactics and ideas for that.”

Purposeful Communication, Mathis explained, means “Figuring out ‘who are the audiences we need to talk to internally, and outside of St. Pete, to help people understand what our arts economy looks like, and to take it to the next level.”

The next section is Dedicated Advocacy and Funding. “We’re actually recommending that we have an umbrella arts organization,” Mathis said, “probably the Arts Alliance, but it could morph into something else.

“The umbrella arts organization is the shepherd that helps to take our arts community to the next level, sort of the nexus between private sector, public sector and all the arts organizations.”

The final section is Benchmarked Progress. “We regularly build into the plan, checking to see how we’re doing, what do we need to change,” said Mathis. “It’s a constant evolution. This isn’t a plan that’s set in stone in any way.”

The Comprehensive Arts Strategy was the result of more than 300 hours of interviews and conversations with members of the public, community and arts leaders and local government.

This included a dozen focus groups, plus open houses, collaborative labs and St. Pete Catalyst polls.

More than 16,000 residents participated, according to the document introduction.

The principal engineers were Mathis, St. Petersburg Arts Alliance director Terry Marks, former SPAA director John Collins and Deputy Mayor Kanika Tomalin.

“This strategy,” the document reads, “builds on our existing strengths and lays out concrete actions to fund and promote the arts, provide dedicated advocacy and leadership for the arts community, and evaluate progress with consensus-driven metrics.”