BY GLORIA STRAVELLI
Staff Writer
Residents of Red Bank will be asked to help shape the future role of arts in the community by participating in the creation of a community cultural plan.
"The community cultural plan will look at the goals of the general public regarding how they would like to participate in and experience the arts, both actively and passively," said Gail O’Reilly, director of special projects for the borough.
"Red Bank has a wealth of arts organizations and now we’ll be able to look at the role they currently play, or potentially could play, in the lives of our residents."
A public meeting will be held Dec. 10 at the municipal building to gather public input for the cultural plan. The time of the meeting has not yet been set.
"We are poised to begin the final phase of formulating a community cultural plan through community outreach," O’Reilly said. "There will be a general meeting, focus groups with segments of the community and a survey."
Surveys will be mailed to residents, posted on the borough’s Web site and available at the municipal building.
According to O’Reilly, the surveys will ask residents to list priority issues the cultural plan should address including arts education, life-long learning, neighborhood projects, heritage festivals and public art.
Other questions it asks are what residents like best about living in Red Bank, what they see as missing, and what the role of borough government should be in cultural development.
Consultants will use the survey results and feedback from the public and arts groups to formulate the cultural plan, which will guide future decisions on issues such as arts facilities and arts programming initiatives, O’Reilly said.
The borough received a total of $25,000 in grants from the State Council on the Arts two years ago to fund the process of developing the community cultural plan after it completed a preplanning process.
ArtsMarket, a Bozeman, Mont., consulting firm that specializes in community cultural assessment, will facilitate the process, O’Reilly said.
An emerging field, community cultural planning focuses on the public’s vision for arts in the community rather than the needs of arts organizations, she explained.
"This is asking, ‘What do we do as ordinary citizens? What is the role that art plays in our lives?’ " O’Reilly said. "And trys to give voice to those ideas. It’s bottom-up planning."
The plan’s development call for a process similar to that undertaken in developing the borough’s master plan, O’Reilly said. Meetings will be held to bring together community groups and consultants, as well as focus groups. A draft plan and recommendations by ArtsMarket will result from the meetings.
The cultural planning process has been ongoing for two years but initially focused on the borough’s formal arts groups.
"The first step was sending a survey to a number of local arts organizations and practitioners and summarizing the results," she said. "Next we are looking at the survey of the general public and at how we want to send that out."
According to O’Reilly, the timing of the process couldn’t be better.
"The neat thing about the current environment we’re in is that a number of ideas are surfacing that we think we’ll be able to pull into this cultural planning activity," she said, citing recent developments at three major art anchors in town. These include the groundbreaking for a new theater on the west side for the Two River Theatre Company, the affiliation of the Children’s Cultural Center with the Community YMCA, and administrative changes at the Count Basie Theatre.
Planners will reach out to other groups including the Red Bank Educational Initiative, she said.
"Fresh ideas are coming in and people are really excited about this project," she said. "We’re feeling very confident about the ability of these organizations to work collaboratively in support of community needs."