A Toast to the Creative Economy continued

A RISING TIDE IN SOCIETY

The June 20 gathering of Northshore and Boston area talent, intellect, and enterprise represented a beginning for CEANS, but the rising importance of "cultural creatives" and the creative economy has been documented for years.

Becker, who served as project director of "The Creative Economy Initiative: A Blueprint for Investment in New England’s Creative Economy," (June 2001) reiterated that the "culture-based" creative economy includes "nonprofit organizations, commercial enterprises and individual artists." Our region boasts a particularly rich array of such endeavors.

The "Blueprint" states, "the creative individual ... is at the epicenter ..." and "... the creative economy functions as a connective tissue that unifies a diverse range of individuals and organizations."

It is an engine driving "revolutionary change in the way people think about the link between art and culture and economic growth."

Demographer and professor Richard Florida, who authored the groundbreaking The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) has much to say about the potential of the creative class to change, well, literally just about everything.

In a May 2005 interview on NPR’s "Weekend Edition Sunday," Florida stated that the creative class "is really the growth sector of our economy and the world economy. In the United States about 40 million people work in this sector of the economy, and worldwide it’s about 150 million. They’re scientists, people who work in technology and innovate, entrepreneurs who start companies ...everyone who works in the artistic and cultural field and entertainment broadly."

Both Becker in her speech and Florida in his most recent work warn, however, that this great resource can be easily squandered. In fact, other countries in the world are taking much bolder initiatives to strengthen their creative economy sectors, and the United States is in danger of losing out in this worldwide trend.

What Florida calls the "Three T’s of economic growth," "Tolerance, Talent, and Technology," he sees as key to flourishing in the new economic structures to come. We need to restore "openness." Florida cautions that our best "long-term strategy, one which takes patience and a committed community, is to home-grow talent."

The Creative Economy Association of the North Shore (CEANS) is dedicated to doing just that.

With the determination, positive energy, and enthusiastic commitment of its members, CEANS is poised to incubate a very bright future. The North Shore is on its way to fulfilling its potential: an abundantly flourishing economic and cultural garden, planted in historically rich soil, bursting with color, fragrance, and new life.

All it will take are wise, and consistent, gardeners.