Creative City : Block by Block
Creative City: Block by Block seeks to connect every Toronto neighbourhood with the transformative power of artistic activity, while building capacity for artists and arts organizations.
Creative City: Block By Block
Creative City: Block by Block was born out of a desire to connect more of Toronto’s neighbourhoods with the transformational value of art.
Toronto Arts Foundation, through its partnership with Toronto Arts Council, has a unique vantage point with regard to the impact of art on community life, on neighbourhood revitalization and on city building.
TAC annually reviews the ambitions, the successes and the challenges of over 600 creative arts organizations and projects, both large and small. Through this adjudication process, as well as through on-going community consultations and symposiums, the Foundation has garnered specific and anecdotal evidence of how arts programs have made lasting impacts on neighbourhoods and on the people who live in them, while also discovering that many neighbourhoods have little or no access to professional art activity.
By acting as convener and catalyst, the Foundation is collaborating with arts organizations, social service agencies, city departments, non-governmental agencies and other organizations who share the vision of creating successful neighbourhoods through the arts and who understand the importance of increasing opportunities for people to enjoy the arts in all regions of Toronto.
By fostering creativity at the local level and enhancing the quality of life in Toronto’s diverse neighbourhoods, Toronto becomes a truly creative city.
By working with partners with shared values, the Foundation will:
- Provide incentive grants to artists and arts organizations with activities in high needs neighbourhoods. By providing new money to artists, neighbourhoods in Toronto in which little or no professional arts will have new opportunities. These grants will be vetted through the highly respected adjudication system of the TAC, insuring accountability, reliability, and artistic excellence.
- Build capacity for arts organizations, connectivity to community members and awareness of arts through the Neighbourhood Arts Network, symposiums, forums and other activities. The Neighbourhood Arts Network, in addition to creating an array of services and support for artists, facilitates networking between individuals, libraries, community and health centres, business improvement associations and many others, enabling community members to easily connect with professional artists.
- With community partners, work to create sustainable arts hubs in high needs areas in Toronto. Arts Hubs can become as essential to a successful neighbourhood as a school, library or a bank. Arts Hubs link people who live in their neighbourhood to professional art organizations and artists who work in a variety of artistic mediums, professional and non-professional, neighbourhood-based, and from outside of the community. For more information on the value of arts hubs and the forms they can take, click here.
- Research, map and evaluate the progress and impact of the arts in Toronto. Toronto Arts Foundation is working in partnership with the City of Toronto, city planners, foundations and academic institutions to analyze the impact of arts funding, map arts programming activities and determine the most effective policy and funding opportunities. By monitoring outcomes of arts investment, the Foundation can increase the efficacy of arts reporting and advocacy. Part of this evaluation is the Metcalf Arts Policy Fellowship, a two year fellowship to explore the connections between arts policy and practice, inspired by the need to foster new thinking about the future of the arts sector. For more information on the Metcalf Arts Policy Fellowship, click here.