CreateNYC: A Cultural Plan for New York City

photo credit: Hester Street

As a partner on the Hester Street team to develop CreateNYC, New York City’s comprehensive cultural plan, NOCD-NY drew on our network of networks to help organize the robust community engagement that resulted in 188,000 people from all five boroughs participating in the planning processes. In “Culture and Wellbeing in New York,” a research report commissioned by the Department of Cultural Affairs to help inform the CreateNYC planning process, the Social Impact of the Arts Project recommends that cultural organizations “strengthen social networks within and between the City’s neighborhoods and find their niche in the neighborhood ecology.” This is very much what NOCD-NY does and is the heart of why we took on this role.

We hosted many community workshops and organized eight focus groups on the following topics: individual artists with JACK; neighborhood plazas and public spaces with the Neighborhood Plaza Program at The Hort; arts, culture and community resilience with the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs; cultural hubs with City Lore, youth with El Puente, organized labor with Local 802, affordable work space with Paul Parkhill, and an arts, culture and public housing roundtable. NOCD-NY collaborated with the NYC Cultural Agenda Fund to facilitate cultural plan grantees and support learning between them, including an artEquity training.

Although the process has concluded, NOCD-NY continues to engage the field around its learnings, most notably through regular Peer Learning Exchanges.