Impact Pillars

ACCM 2027 Impact Pillar Descriptions
The impact pillars of Create to Change: Building Our Civic Power continue CA for the Arts' legacy of strengthening California’s arts and culture ecosystem, supporting artists and cultural workers, and ensuring arts and culture remain essential to the civic, economic, and social life of our communities. Through this work, we seek systems change that benefits creative workers, creative businesses, and creative places while generating creative solutions that strengthen communities across California. Each pillar tells part of a larger story about the conditions artists and communities need not only to create, but to thrive, organize, advocate, and shape California's future. Together, these pillars connect our 2027 Summit programming with our broader advocacy, policy, field-building, and narrative-change work.

As you develop your breakout session proposal, we invite you to consider how your work connects to one or more of the following pillars. These areas are intentionally expansive and interconnected. Proposals do not need to address every topic within a pillar, and we especially welcome sessions that demonstrate connections across multiple pillars. 

Seeking systems change that benefits creative workers, creative businesses, and creative places and generates creative solutions.

CREATIVE BUSINESSES
Creative Businesses explores how artists, creative entrepreneurs, cultural organizations, and creative enterprises contribute to California’s economic vitality and how we can build an economy in which creative communities have the resources, ownership, and opportunities to share in the prosperity they help generate. This pillar considers the systems and infrastructure that help creative ideas become sustainable enterprises, while recognizing the many ways creative businesses contribute to local economies, cultural identity, and thriving communities.

This pillar includes creative entrepreneurship; cooperative and community ownership; cultural and creative districts; rural creative economies; funding and access to capital; economic opportunity; business development and sustainability; arts and corporate partnerships; urbanism and cultural policy; and policies and investments that strengthen California’s creative economy.

We encourage proposals that move beyond demonstrating the economic impact of arts and culture to explore how we build an economy that invests in creativity. Sessions might examine new models of ownership, entrepreneurship, and cooperative enterprise; access to capital and resources; public-private partnerships; policy solutions; and strategies that help creative businesses and cultural organizations not only survive but grow, innovate, and build lasting economic power within their communities.
 

CREATIVE WORKERS 
Creative Workers centers the artists, culture bearers, arts administrators, cultural workers, educators, and other creative professionals whose labor, knowledge, and imagination make California’s creative and cultural ecosystem possible. This pillar explores what creative workers need to build sustainable lives and careers while maintaining agency, ownership, and creative freedom in a rapidly changing economic and technological landscape.

This pillar includes workforce development; labor rights; portable benefits and safety nets; artist housing; Creative Corps; individual artist fellowships; funding and economic opportunity; artificial intelligence and emerging technology; intellectual property and a Data Bill of Rights; human creativity; cultural heritage and representation; Creative Youth Development; arts education; and pathways into creative careers.

We encourage proposals that explore the policies, protections, resources, learning opportunities, and systems necessary to value creative labor as work and invest in the people who create California’s culture. Sessions might examine economic security and worker protections, housing and benefits, professional and workforce development, the impact of AI and emerging technologies on creative labor, intellectual property and ownership, or how arts education and Creative Youth Development can build pathways for the next generation of creative workers. Proposals may also explore how creative workers can organize, advocate, and exercise greater agency in shaping the policies and systems that directly affect their work and livelihoods.
 

CREATIVE PLACES
Creative Places focuses on the communities, neighborhoods, cultural districts, venues, public spaces, and creative infrastructure where arts and culture are created, experienced, preserved, and shared. This pillar explores what is needed to ensure that California’s communities have the sustained public investment and physical infrastructure necessary for arts and culture to thrive, while recognizing that access to creative spaces and resources is not equitable across the state.

This pillar includes permanent and increased investment in the California Arts Council; Cultural District funding; capital funding for arts and cultural facilities; equitable access to public investment; cultural infrastructure; preservation of cultural spaces; public lands and parks; rural arts; community development; and policies that strengthen creative places throughout California.

We encourage proposals that explore how public policy, funding, and community-driven development can protect, sustain, and invest in the places where culture lives. Sessions might examine long-term public funding for arts and culture, investment in California Cultural Districts, capital funding models that address inequities in traditional earmarks and infrastructure investment, preservation of cultural spaces and neighborhoods, or strategies for ensuring rural, historically under-resourced, and culturally specific communities have equitable access to resources. Proposals may also consider how artists and cultural communities can have greater agency in determining how their neighborhoods, cultural assets, and creative infrastructure are developed, funded, and preserved.

CREATIVE SOLUTIONS
Creative Solutions explores how artists, culture bearers, cultural organizations, and creative practices can help communities imagine and develop new approaches to some of California’s most pressing challenges. This pillar recognizes creativity not only as a form of expression, but as a civic resource, bringing artists and cultural communities into partnership with government, healthcare, education, environmental, and community-based sectors to create solutions rooted in the experiences, knowledge, and imagination of communities.

This pillar includes arts and health; civic engagement and democracy; community health and well-being; social prescribing; environmental and climate justice; cultural sustainability; community resilience; belonging; justice and equity; cross-sector partnerships; and artist-led public service models such as California Creative Corps.

We encourage proposals that demonstrate how creativity can move communities from imagining change to creating solutions. Sessions might explore artists as partners in public health and healthcare, creative approaches to civic participation and community organizing, arts-based responses to climate and environmental challenges, or programs such as California Creative Corps that position artists and culture bearers as contributors to public problem-solving. Proposals may also examine how creative practice can strengthen belonging, build community resilience, expand participation, and bring new voices and approaches into the systems and institutions shaping California’s future.

At its heart, Creative Solutions asks us to consider what becomes possible when artists and cultural communities are not brought in only to respond to change, but are resourced and empowered to help design it.