Okanagan Creative Council Okanagan Creative Council

Promoting Sustainable Cultural Development

Research, Marketing, Outreach, Fundraising, Collaboration
In association with the Okanagan Institute and
Okanagan College

   Okanagan Creative Council Community creative development creates opportunities to bring the arts and the community together. When communities participate in creative activity the experience is different from merely consuming someone's creative work. We start thinking and feeling about culture in new ways.

Our communities are changing, and becoming more complex. In every sector of society traditions are collapsing, jobs are changing or disappearing, and there is growing skepticism about our institutions. At the same time there are new opportunities and growing numbers of people engaged in creating better futures, and more vibrant engagements with their communities. Cultural workers and institutions are a major contributors to community transformation.

Community creative development can help to build a sustaining and sustainable infrastructure for all arts and culture through participation, partnerships and strategic initiatives. Community cultural development is a set of social and artistic skills, practices and competencies supported by a history, a body of theory, and a dedicated delivery infrastructure.

Social marketing is explored through alliances, through sharing knowledge and capacities, through defining and renewing purposes, and through making vibrant connections with the community, and through partnerships with organizations in healthcare, education, social services, tecchnology, environment, government and others in the public and private sectors.

The Okanagan Creative Council provides opportunities and resources, and encourage interactions among arts groups of all sizes and orientations, community and professional arts organizations, artists, writers, academics, arts practitioners and advocates, organizations whose usual focus is not the arts, governments, non-profit organizations and institutions, corporations, enterprises, entrepreneurs, and others.

The Creative Value Chain

The creative industries can play a major role in helping us understand, live through, and co-create the deeper cultural transformations our communities are experiencing.

Community creative development connects the arts and the community, and addresses some of the issues that have plagued the arts community for years: inadequate public and private sector support, a shrinking base, charges of elitism and irrelevance.

Community creative development includes:
  • arts created with communities, not for communities
  • community processes where artists are integrated, equal partners, as well as illustrators, interpreters or observers
  • community arts projects which encourage our critical thought and action
  • many people from many sectors engaged in community arts processes which are longer-term and unpredictable, but produce measurable results using new criteria
  • the production of arts which have meaning that is recognized and understood by community members
  • partnerships which cross traditional boundaries and put people and resources together in new ways that benefit everyone
  • the continuing development of a body of community-building skills such as facilitation, consensus-building, collaboration, listening, communication
  • opportunities for everyone to participate in the production of culture, to develop cultural literacy and to speak directly and profoundly of their own experiences.

    		•   Okanagan Creative Council
    Introduction
    Our Process
    An Invitation


    The Okanagan Creative Council is a group of progressive citizens, companies, institutions and organizations who want to put creativity and the arts back into the centre of Okanagan life.

    To join the Council, and receive updates, contact the Directors here.