Greater Lafayette Regional Arts & Culture Strategy
Benton, Carroll, Fountain, Montgomery, Tippecanoe, Warren, and White counties
WHY
The Greater Lafayette READI Region is home to a vibrant, accessible, and inclusive arts and culture ecosystem. In all corners of the region, the arts economically enrich communities while strengthening relationships and enhancing personal well-being. The goals of this plan aim to increase the visibility of arts and culture resources and opportunities; connect communities through arts and culture; develop arts and culture programs that are accessible and inclusive to all; and foster and leverage local arts and culture amenities.
The Greater Lafayette READI Region is made up of seven counties in West Central Indiana: Benton, Carroll, Fountain, Montgomery, Tippecanoe, Warren, and White. The Wabash River cuts through the middle of the region, creating many opportunities for dynamic waterfront developments. The region varies dramatically in population, containing both one of the largest counties by population in Indiana (Tippecanoe) and two of the smallest (Benton and Warren). Much of the region is rural with an agricultural landscape, with the exception of the cities of Lafayette and West Lafayette, though other small towns and communities provide more localized centers for arts and culture for residents.
HOW
Throughout the planning process, engagement was conducted to help identify and assess existing resources and gaps and provide a foundation for transformative projects. Methods of engagement were used to glean information from stakeholders and the general public included community workshops, stakeholder conversations and digital surveys.
WHAT
This Arts and Culture plan tenders a flexible framework, thus creating opportunities for decision-makers to pursue diverse funding sources and pivot implementation priorities to take advantage of changes and growth in the local cultural ecosystem. It also allows the community to continue to dream big, yet places emphasis on actionable, momentum-building steps for growing local arts and culture assets and tackle them as additional funding and capacity becomes available. Each objective outlined is accompanied by strategies to support the objective, timing, personnel requirements, impact, and relative impact, when appropriate. These strategies are expanded upon for each of the regional, county and facility levels.
South Bend - Elkhart Regional Partnership Arts Plan
Elkhart, Marshall, and St. Joseph counties
WHY
Our planning team developed a suite of recommendations that will take the South Bend - Elkhart region’s current arts and culture landscape forward, from great to exceptional. Any region, county, or city can provide well-designed public spaces, or purposeful facilities, but a region that is seeking uncompromising, world-class experiences must also consider how these spaces will elevate its ways of thinking, working, and engaging in order to enrich the larger community’s cultural fabric. The region has all of the right ingredients to sustain its current arts and culture landscape, but this plan will enable the region to thrive.
With so many resources and so much functioning smoothly in the region, funders might overlook the South Bend - Elkhart region and instead distribute support to regions whose arts and culture landscape is not as well-stewarded. But with the region at the precipice of greatness, after decades of rebuilding and reconnecting with its heart and soul, this place is steps away from fully realizing its journey to become a thriving destination to live, work, play and grow.
HOW
The South Bend - Elkhart region is made up of Elkhart, Marshall, and St. Joseph counties, all of which have similar land areas, though their populations vary significantly. While much of the rural landscape is agricultural, many downtown areas provide hubs of arts and culture for residents in and around those areas. This plan was shaped by many communities and reveals a collective vision for regional growth through arts and culture experiences and economic activity. In order to fully execute the vision and goals of this plan, many organizations will need to work together across the region in various capacities. This plan provides a comprehensive guide to how regional, county, and local agencies and organizations will support the full potential of the South Bend - Elkhart regional arts and culture plan.
WHAT
The South Bend - Elkhart Regional Arts and Culture Plan goes beyond the surface to showcase the region’s capacity to be a national leader in the arts and culture landscape. This plan provides ample information about the region’s prime geographic location, its world-class arts and culture organizations, and its remarkable physical assets and facilities; beyond that, many individual organizations can provide ample data about its respective economic impact, outreach, visitor ship, engagement, and beyond.
While this plan primarily reflects a unique set of technical recommendations and strategies for the region to act upon, it does so with a tailored understanding of the region’s tenacious character, commitment to excellence every day, and attitude that nothing is impossible when the community comes together.
Wabash River Region Arts & Culture Plan
Clay, Parks, Sullivan, Vermillion, and Vigo Counties, Indiana
WHY
The Wabash River region is made up of five counties in western Indiana on its Illinois border: Clay, Parks, Sullivan, Vermillion, and Vigo. The Wabash River cuts through the region from north to the south, providing dynamic and thriving waterfronts across both rural and urban areas, with many opportunities for investment and expansion. While much of the rural landscape is agricultural and forested, many downtown areas provide hubs of arts and culture for residents in and around those areas. The region is home to an exciting and deeply collaborative arts community. Together, they will cultivate compelling destinations for public art and diverse cultural experiences, making the region a vibrant and engaging hub for arts and culture. The main goals of this plan are beautification and placemaking, community pride, health and wellness, and local investment. Targeted goals of the Regional Arts & Culture Plan include beautification and placemaking, boosting community pride, encouraging health and wellness, and investing in the community by preserving historic assets and supporting local organizations, facilities and programs.
HOW
Engagement for this process was conducted to help identify and assess existing resources and gaps and provide a foundation for transformative projects. Engagement was promoted through RDA social media and through stakeholder networks. Engagement took the form of community surveys, stakeholder conversations, and public engagement such as a focus group held at Arts Illiana with members of the 41|40 Arts & Cultural District Advisory Group, as well as two public meetings. The primary concerns gleaned from public engagement included lack of funding for arts organizations, limited performance space and opportunities to experience local cultures in community settings.
WHAT
The Wabash River Regional Arts & Culture Plan provides a flexible, proactive framework that creates opportunities for decision-makers to pursue diverse funding sources and pivot implementation priorities to take advantage of changes and growth in the local cultural ecosystem. It also allows the community to continue to dream big, yet places emphasis on actionable, momentum-building steps for growing local arts and culture assets and tackle them as additional funding and capacity becomes available. The plan details the three priority regional objectives as well as actionable steps to reach them. These objectives include strengthening the Wabash River Region arts and culture community, promote regional arts development and tourism with a focus on the 41|40 Arts & Cultural District, and increasing the visibility of arts and culture in community spaces and downtowns.
New Braunfels Arts & Culture Strategic Master Plan
New Braunfels, Texas
WHY
New Braunfels is one of the fastest-growing cities in the United States, and its cultural foundation — more than 250 years of Indigenous, German, Hispanic, and Texan heritage — is both its greatest asset and its greatest opportunity. Yet despite a rich history and genuine creative energy, the arts community has operated in fragments: organizations working in silos, artists without adequate space and resources to reach the broader community, and a cultural tourism economy that hasn’t reached far beyond river recreation and German-based heritage experiences. This plan exists because New Braunfels deserves a cultural future as distinctive as its past.
HOW
Through more than 1,200 community connection points, including public workshops, stakeholder conversations, pop-up events, and a digital survey, the planning team engaged with residents, artists, historians, educators, and city leaders to define what arts and culture mean to New Braunfels and what it would take to unlock the creative potential. That process surfaced six shared pillars for the plan: expanding creative spaces, strengthening visibility, connecting culture and tourism, encouraging collaboration, investing in belonging, and telling a cohesive story.
WHAT
This project serves as a comprehensive ten-year roadmap to bringing forth the cultural undercurrent of the community and unleashing the economic and social benefits of sustained cultural investment. This framework leverages strategic financial tools available to the City, establishes a governance framework for dedicated arts leadership, and provides policy and process guidance to support and empower cultural creators, non-profits, and creative entrepreneurs across the community.
Organized around four priority areas — Programming and Community Experiences, Places and Spaces, Visibility and Tourism, and Organizational Capacity — the plan charts short-, medium-, and long-term strategies to grow the cultural ecosystem, support the artists and organizations already doing the work, and position New Braunfels as a cultural anchor for the Texas Hill Country and a leader in arts investment.
Reimagining Columbus
Columbus, Ohio
WHY
In the turbulent summer of 2020, when protests erupted over police brutality against people of color and controversial statues were being toppled and defaced nationwide, the City of Columbus preemptively removed its Christopher Columbus statue from the steps of City Hall. With the statue in storage, the City of Columbus partnered with Designing Local in 2023 to seek funding from the Mellon Foundation for “Reimagining Columbus,” a 2-year research, community engagement, and design process to reckon with the statue and imagine a future in which truths about its subject are more accurately conveyed. The proposal was awarded $2 million and Designing Local was tasked with managing the project.
HOW
Designing Local managed a multi-disciplinary team to undertake the following:
RESEARCH & LEARNING. In order to confidently recommend a course of action regarding the City of Columbus’ Christopher Columbus statue, the Reimagining Columbus project team felt it was important to be grounded in truths about the explorer and his legacies, particularly those within Columbus, Ohio. Learnings from subject matter experts, museums and site tours, original research, community conversations, and arts and culture colleagues nationwide were used to educate the public and inform project deliverables.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT. In recognition that conversations about the Columbus statue would challenge participants — particularly those from the city’s Indigenous, Italian-American, and Black communities — the Reimagining Columbus engagement team planned a process that would accommodate their emotions about it but also forge a collective path forward. The team’s approach to this conversation utilized a customized, emotional safety–oriented methodology centered on Sankofa, the Ghanan idea that progress requires applying lessons from the past, to encourage more courageous sharing and evoke personal histories that could be influencing present-day perceptions. Large group and affinity group conversations, community events, and written feedback were employed in various ways throughout the process.
DESIGN. The project’s design team worked to translate the learnings from research and community engagement into a design concept for a possible new Christopher Columbus statue placement. The team relied on Indigenous design principles to guide their vision for an immersive experience of nature and community togetherness at which visitors could experience the statue (or not), but also learn, play, restore themselves, and heal.
WHAT
Designing Local delivered the following Reimagining Columbus project outcomes:
A website and StoryMap timeline, 2 research papers, 35 videos with more than 20 hours of educational content, and several in-person community learning exchanges provided context regarding Christopher Columbus, the statue of his likeness and public perceptions of it, and the city’s relationship with its namesake.
More than 20 community events and affinity group conversations elicited rich, layered feedback to help inform the design process.
Conceptual designs of a new space in which to display and contextualize the statue, based on Indigenous design principles, translated research and community feedback into physical elements that could tell the story of Columbus — the city and the man — and help all visitors experience emotional safety in the space. So expansive did this vision become that the city, the Reimagining Columbus project team, and community members were inspired to embrace it as a generational vision for an altogether new type of public space in the city.
An art plan for City Hall campus suggested how new art could refresh and enliven this uninspiring civic space and ensure that it celebrates all city residents.
View the Project Outcomes Here
NCIRPC Strategic Arts Plan
Cass, Clinton, Fulton, Howard, Miami, and Tipton Counties, Indiana
WHY
The North Central Indiana Regional Planning Council (NCIRPC), together with its partners, has developed a comprehensive, collaborative, and strategic plan to support and expand arts and cultural initiatives across the six-county region. With a strong focus on building community and fostering a thriving creative economy, the plan seeks to improve accessibility to the arts, retain and attract artists and creatives, and strengthen cultural amenities. With more than 226,000 people living across 2,100 square miles and significant development along regional corridors including Route 31, US 24, and 165, there are many opportunities for increased investment in arts and culture to enhance quality of life for residents and expand recreational tourism. The NCIRPC region is a vibrant destination for arts and culture that encourages community building and inclusivity, with a diverse artistic landscape that attracts creatives and cultural consumers to visit and invest in local communities. The goals of this plan include increasing accessibility and visibility of the arts, fostering and leveraging existing resources and amenities, invigorating local economies, and creating a stronger sense of pride in local experiences. Its objectives include developing state-of-the-art arts and culture facilities that engage residents and create new tourism opportunities, expanding engaging public art throughout the region, and encouraging programming in North Central Indiana communities that improves quality of life through increased access to arts experiences.
HOW
Engagement with local professionals and stakeholders was vital to the success of this process, with participation facilitated through a digital community survey and virtual conversations with the planning team. Business owners, arts organizations, elected officials, and community members contributed through a series of focus groups and one-on-one discussions, helping to identify priorities that shaped a shared vision, established project goals, and guided the prioritization of future efforts. Regional priorities played a significant role, and the flexibility of the long-term cultural planning framework allows decision-makers to pursue diverse funding sources while adapting implementation strategies to reflect changes and growth within the local cultural ecosystem. This nimble approach encourages the community to continue thinking ambitiously while emphasizing practical, momentum-building steps to strengthen local arts and cultural assets as funding and capacity evolve.
WHAT
Key priorities outlined in the plan include increasing the visibility of arts in downtown areas, improving accessibility to the arts, providing meaningful local experiences, fostering a sense of community pride, capitalizing on tourism opportunities, and attracting artists and creatives. NCI identified a variety of arts and culture projects through county- and regional-level public input meetings, one-on-one interviews, and an online survey. These projects were reviewed and selected for inclusion in the plan based on their level of readiness, regional impact, and alignment with overall objectives. Together, they support and expand arts and culture initiatives across the six-county North Central Region. Planned efforts encompass implementing public art—such as Arts and Heritage public pedestrian and bike paths, enhancing downtown placemaking, expanding arts education programs, and developing community spaces for artists and arts programming.