Create Long Beach Public Forum

I was part of a public forum hosted at MoLAA by Create Long Beach and the Arts Council for Long Beach. The goal was to share findings from community input regarding the arts and culture in the city over the next 20 years.

Create Long Beach has been conducting a community cultural planning process to identify the city's creative assets and generate ideas to invigorate our culture of creativity.

This process has identified six emerging themes:

1. Improving communication and collaboration within the cultural/creative sector and between the cultural/creative sector and the community.

2. Building on Long Beach's diversity to strengthen cultural and creative participation throughout the city and in its neighborhoods.

3. Emphasizing a range of creative learning opportunities for residents of all ages to support a city-wide culture of creativity.

4. Fostering a sustainable ecology of creative individuals and collaborative, innovative cultural organizations of all sizes, ages, disciplines and locations.

5. Encouraging more effective use of cultural assets including venues, districts, organizations, and programs in support of economic development.

6. Strengthening inclusive cultural leadership to identify, advocate for, and obtain the necessary financial and human resources.

It'll be interesting to see what kind of follow up takes place after this forum.

Spring Connections Party 2009

The Connections Party on Saturday was awesome! We had a great turn out of about 60 people from about 20 different groups.

We had folks from the community share with everyone a little about their group, business or event:

• Elliot Gonzales - upcoming Long Beach Green Festival on May 9th
• Evan Kelly and Ten Terrell - Phantom Galleries and 2nd Saturday Art Walk
• Carina Cristiano-Leoni - Connected Corridor
• Mark Hawkins - Ink Peace
  
• John Steffans - Gay Christian Network
  
• Dr. Becky Kuhn - Global Lifeworks

Big thanks to community groups who donated door prizes:

• Aquarium of the Pacific
• Museum of Latin American Art
• National History Museum of Los Angeles
  
• Long Beach Museum of Art
• Nino's Italian Restaurant
• Baba Ganouj - Food of Lebanon Restaurant
• Ink Peace, LLC
• AMC Theatres
  

Thanks to local band Wings for the Queen for playing for us! You guys were awesome!

More thanks to the Neighborhood Resource Center for lending us chairs and tables and also thanks to everyone that helped out too!

Preliminary Planning for Festival

So while working with Elliot regarding the Green Festival, we decided to first bring together some people that Elliot had been talking with about it.

We had the meeting and it looks like there are folks excited about the event. It'll be fun to work with them!

Alright, let's roll up our sleeves!

Upcoming Connections Party

We've been planning a Connections Party the past several weeks to provide a context and an opportunity to bring together many of the connections we've been making in the community over the past several months. The goal is to facilitate introductions between folks and to allow people to share about their own organization or business or event that's coming up.

We'll learn about volunteer opportunities, hear from community groups, enjoy live music by "Wings for the Queen", grub on some Mexican tacos, and win prizes donated by community businesses!

For more info, check out the viral flyer here.