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Using arts to help Flint pursue promise as a healthy, vital city
By ANN RICHARDS
Increasingly, cultural districts are a popular economic development strategy for helping revive the cores of communities of all sizes across the U.S.
But when Larry R. Thompson first laid eyes on the Flint (Michigan) Cultural Center (FCC) in 1993, he had never seen anything quite like it.
“I couldn’t believe the city had this beautiful park complex with so many different institutions. The closest thing I’d ever seen to Flint’s cultural center was Lincoln Center in New York,” he said.
“The basic concept -- a set of cultural organizations located together on one campus -- blew me away. I fell in love with the center and saw all the opportunity it represented.”
The Flint Cultural Center provides year-round activities for area schoolchildren. |
Shortly afterward, Thompson -- director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland at the time -- was named the first president and chief executive officer of the newly created
Flint Cultural Center Corporation (FCCC). But he was keenly aware of the challenges involved in bringing the campus -- and its various cultural institutions -- back to life.
“Quite frankly, when I arrived the center was practically on its last legs. Building maintenance had been deferred and deferred and deferred. The reserve fund created to maintain the campus and help operate the various organizations had been slowly chipped away over the years.”
Paul Torre, who took over the operation of the Flint Institute of Music (FIM) in 1995, agrees.
“It was pretty grim. Our roof leaked. We were three-quarters of a million dollars in debt. And our audiences and donors had pretty much fallen away.”
Today, after 15 years of hard work, cooperation and a $65-million infusion of capital, operating and endowment support from the Mott Foundation, the cultural center is considered one of the region’s strongest assets.
That total includes three recent grants for general operating and programming support: $1.7 million to the FCCC, $800,000 to the Flint Institute of Arts (FIA) and $568,748 to the FIM. Among the programs supported are the Spotlight Series of visiting performers, special art exhibitions, the Flint Symphony Orchestra, and numerous educational programs and classes for children and adults.
The campus was built in the late 1950s and 1960s with support from many individuals and organizations in the community. In addition to FIA and FIM, the 30-acre campus is home to the Alfred P. Sloan Museum and Buick Gallery & Research Center, the Flint Youth Theatre at Bower Theater, the Robert T. Longway Planetarium, and The Whiting Auditorium.
It also includes the main branch of the Flint Public Library and the Sarvis Center -- a conference facility owned and operated by Flint Community Schools. Sarvis also houses the Pierce Cultural Center Elementary School, a model school that uses campus resources in its daily curriculum.
The FCCC -- created in 1992 -- is responsible for maintenance and oversight of the campus as well as the day-to-day management and programming of the auditorium, the youth theatre, the planetarium and the history museum. It also coordinates campuswide marketing, collaborative programs and special events.
Although the Mott Foundation had funded individual cultural institutions for many years, support was increased significantly after the FCCC was established. Grants for endowment, capital improvements and operations were initiated with the intent of helping the center become sustainable.
The strategy was intended to improve the buildings and grounds while providing seed funding to increase staffing, fundraising, programming and outreach to schools and community organizations.
“The funding helped us fix what was broken,” said Cindy Ornstein, who took over as CEO of the FCCC in 2000.
“It’s not sexy, it’s not glamorous to fund infrastructure. But it has enabled us to effect a lot of change and allowed us to respond to the community’s needs, develop new donors, and make us competitive without worrying about whether or not the lights are on.
“This support also has given us the freedom to build and enhance programs that enable our visitors to learn, grow and expand their horizons.”
Another important benefit of such support, she said, is that it strengthens institutions that increasingly are offering programs that appeal across age, income and racial differences, which is critical if residents are to come together as a community.
“In the Flint area, there are so many issues and barriers that work against engagement and collaboration,” she said. “Mott’s support is helping build a place where people from disparate backgrounds can share experiences and find common ground and common interests.”
The FCC is a major asset in the Flint area’s efforts to reinvent itself and restore its prosperity, says Fred Merrill, a principal planner for Sasaki Associates Inc. in Watertown, Massachusetts. The urban planning and design firm has helped create master plans for the development of Flint’s downtown, cultural district and university corridor neighborhoods.
“Right now, the cultural center is like a little island. The trick will be to build connections with the downtown and university and make those connections friendlier and more walkable,” Merrill said.
“Thousands of people come into the cultural center. Flint needs to make the city more ‘sticky’ -- to figure out how to keep people from leaving once they’re there.”
In the past year, the cultural center welcomed more than 573,000 visitors. Their diversity -- ranging from thousands of UAW members and their families on Labor Day 2007 to the sold-out premiere of a documentary on 1960s radical John Sinclair to raise funds for the Flint Creative Alliance, a collective of young artists and musicians -- speaks to the efforts that cultural center institutions have made to become more accessible and inviting to a wider range of patrons.
Support for the cultural center is part of a larger Mott effort to support Flint’s assets as the city attempts to regain its equilibrium in the wake of deindustrialization and job losses in the automotive industry.
The Community Foundation of Greater Flint has been the recipient of Mott grants to establish six endowment funds benefiting the cultural center as well as local, grassroots arts agencies. Mott also has made grants to other, smaller arts agencies in Genesee County.
A strategic plan for the cultural center was developed in the early 1990s and emphasized fundraising -- a task made easier with Mott’s lead gift of $6 million in challenge funding.
The physical transformation of the cultural center began in the late 1990s with a $7.8-million facelift and upgrade of Whiting Auditorium. The expansion was just one of several capital improvements funded in part by the Foundation since 2000.
In 2000-01, Bower Theater and Longway Planetarium added a $2.7-million classroom wing and facilities upgrade. The construction was funded by Mott in recognition of the nationally known Flint Youth Theatre’s drama school and programming for thousands of K-12 students throughout the county.
The Flint Institute of Music is home to the largest performing arts school in Michigan. |
Theater and Longway Planetarium added a $2.7-million classroom wing and facilities upgrade. The construction was funded by Mott in recognition of the nationally known Flint Youth Theatre’s drama school and programming for thousands of K-12 students throughout the county.
The FIM also underwent a $6.4-million renovation and expansion. That has enabled the institution to double the enrollment at the Flint School of Performing Arts to 3,900 students, of whom 300 are receiving financial aid and 1,200 are involved in tuition-free programs.
The FIA raised almost $20 million to expand and renovate galleries and public places and a classroom wing. Enrollment has grown at its art school, which primarily serves local children and adults, although programming extends to schools in 17 surrounding counties.
Programming the various institutions has been another major change in the past 15 years. The 2,000-seat Whiting, now in use about 170 days a year, was largely dormant in the early 1990s, used primarily as a rental facility for private promoters and the home of the Flint Symphony Orchestra.
“Unfortunately, many residents looked on the cultural center as a place serving the elite. We worked very hard to break those kinds of barriers down. The arts … are for all of us,” said Thompson, now president of the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida.
“Critical to the revitalization of the cultural center was our understanding of the value of working together -- of being seen as one entity.
“Our natural tendency is to separate and concentrate only on an individual organization. It takes a lot of force to keep organizations working together, to host something as complex as the Midwest Summer Workshop of New York City’s Joffrey Ballet or some of the phenomenal community events that take place.”
Said John B. Henry, who has directed the FIA since 1996, “For all of us on campus, it’s a labor of love -- but it’s labor nonetheless.”
Since reopening in 2006 following its expansion, FIA staff members have redoubled their efforts to entice visitors, introducing the showing of art films on weekends year-round and hosting exhibits -- such as the recent “Deconstructing the American Athlete” -- that appeal to nontraditional audiences.
“The cultural center is important to the city’s revitalization,” Henry said. “We’re also an economic engine. Study after study confirms that dollars spent on a cultural event spill over to other businesses and are recycled within the community many times over.”
Spreading ownership of the cultural center across the community -- and increasingly across the region -- has been a major driver of Ornstein’s seven-year tenure.
“There are so many potential audiences out there. We need to increase our local and regional profile -- and that means constant dialogue with our patrons and partners, that means providing meaningful programming, and that means making the cultural center a beautiful and exciting place to be,” she said.
“Programmatically, we’ve made huge leaps. We’ve been able to pursue ever-higher standards, professionalize our services, and maintain communications with area schools and other key institutions.”
“Awareness and accessibility -- ultimately, that’s what will make us sustainable.”
Although supporting a specific program at The Whiting is far more appealing to donors than a gift that will cover utilities, leaf and snow removal, curriculum development, or paper for the copier, Ornstein said, funding those seemingly mundane expenses is essential to maintaining the quality and quantity of programming.
At the end of the day, the arts can be pivotal in creating opportunities, she said.
“At the Flint Cultural Center, we are striving to create a place where all types of people want to immerse themselves in arts and culture. We are focusing on building our audiences as Flint’s downtown continues to make improvements.
“We hope that, ultimately, the college campuses, the downtown, the Farmers Market and the cultural center will become one contiguous environment of opportunities and activities for Flint and mid-Michigan.”