Arts and culture can encompass many experiences, things, passions, and landscapes. They can be just about anything, but when art, culture, and place intersect, the combination can transform a community, a city, or a region. Grand Rapids and its surrounding areas have many examples of arts and culture, including beautiful museums, music venues, cultural festivals, street art, performing arts, and much more.
However, there isn’t a collective body that brings various arts and culture leaders together using a systemic approach, and the Arts and Culture Collective Grand Rapids (ACCGR) is a movement attempting to change that. Prompted by Steelcase Inc., a group of Arts Sector leaders were invited to come together and imagine how the sector could collaborate more effectively to strengthen arts and equity in Grand Rapids.
In July 2019, The Arts Working Group (AWG) was formed and created a loose plan for how the group would work together and what to work towards, with a focus on developing diversity, equity, and inclusion resources, working towards a sector impact study to establish a cultural impact report; and to begin making a collective case for public funding.
It is important to note that the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the murder of George Floyd, made it difficult for ACCGR to continue to build the momentum needed to build cohesion, trust, and a sense of collective purpose.
Led by community leaders, the collective regrouped in 2023, and Steff Rosalez, CEO of Grandville Avenue Arts and Humanities, pieced together a historical retelling, which can be found in the appendix. It holds ACCGR’s beginning, historical context, and other relevant information critical in getting the ACCGR collective where it is today.
KConnect was introduced to ACCGR near the end of 2023, and our partnership sought to embed collective impact to spark positive change at a systems level. Very early in our collaboration, it was clear that this group was ready to build a movement dedicated to driving improvement and innovation within the Arts and Culture spaces by uniting diverse community leaders. It can be argued that based on the group’s ability to build trust, ACCGR made more positive strides forward from November 2023 to May 2024 than in nearly four years combined.
This report, created by KConnect President Salvador López, shares the tensions, wins, and lessons from KConnect’s collaboration with ACCGR, largely over the first six months of 2024.
