The Beginning

Welcome to Arts Council Napa Valley's Cultural Planning Blog!

In this forum, you will be able to follow the process as we create a Cultural Plan for Napa County. Considering the diversity of our population, as well as the differing needs & opportunities in each city in this valley, we face unique challenges in creating this plan. But we are also blessed with a wealth of arts & culture in this community, and we are excited about bringing creative people together and rebuilding our arts sector from the ground up.

I'm Michelle Williams, Executive Director of Arts Council Napa Valley. As the Project Manager for the Cultural Plan, I will do much of the writing for this blog; but I hope to have numerous guest posters, from ACNV staff, the Cultural Planning Strategy Team, and community members & volunteers who get involved in the process.

The first phase of this process is all about gathering data, or "shaking the trees", as Kristina (Program Manager for ACNV) and I have been calling it. Our first job is to create a database of all artists, arts education opportunites, artistic venues, and arts groups in the entire Napa Valley. It's a huge job, and more than a bit daunting, but we are recruiting a host of volunteers to help us not only find all of these people, venues, and opportunities, but to get them involved as well. The next step will be reaching out to the community, via surveys, interviews, focus groups, and "town hall" meetings, to discover what this community needs & wants from its arts. I'm anxious to get to that phase- to really get out there and "talk arts"- and I'm prepared to be surprised by what we find.

Our very first meeting with Morrie Warshawski, our cultural planning consultant, was incredibly inspiring, and so far we've been able to bring that excitement to everyone we've talked to about this project. So while this is indeed a grand undertaking, it is also something that will directly affect the health & vibrancy of the Napa Valley community, and that is one of the things that fuels all of us to really "show up" for this whole process. And considering we've been talking about doing this for years, to actually be in the thick of it is really exciting.

One of the most important components of this process is the creation of a Strategy Team. This team is going to guide us as we move through the phases, and ultimately will look at all of the data compiled through the discovery phase and craft the recommendations that will ultimately become the plan. I'm thrilled by the team that we've recruited so far: Calistoga City Councilmember Placido Garcia, who is a musician and long-time community member; Kathryn Reasoner, the director of the di Rosa Preserve and a veteran of numerous planning projects; Steve Gordon, artist and owner of the Gordon Gallery in Yountville; Nancy Garden, owner of the White Barn and longtime community member of St Helena; and Ira Wolk, owner of I. Wolk Gallery in St Helena, and ACNV Board member. I'll continue to build this team over the next week or so, and I look forward to working with all of them.

Our first big volunteer meeting is this Wednesday night, and our deadlines for the creation of the Strategy Team and the "Tree Shaking" are looming. Much work to do!