CulturePAC

Community Development Through Music is a program model for workforce development and entrepreneurial training in non-performing aspects of the arts, music, culture and entertainment industries. 
    The goals of Community Development Through Music are two-fold – to expand the employment and entrepreneurial base surrounding our creative cultural industries and to develop the necessary services performers and producers of cultural products and services need to grow their careers and businesses to the benefit of their neighborhoods, communities and the region as a whole.
    Community Development Through Music is specifically designed to accomplish these goals and to further facilitate effective entry and participation in the emerging cultural economy and its new markets.  In addition, Community Development Through Music is designed to provide the access and resources for those most often denied in the past, specifically the residents of New Orleans’ 7th and 9th Wards, Treme and Central City, the very same neighborhoods where the vast majority of cultural products and services the City and its tourism industry trade upon come from - neighborhoods that have suffered the most disinvestment in recent decades, contributing to an ongoing rise in rates of underemployment, falling wages, joblessness and poverty. 

    Musicians Walter "Wolfman" Washington & Troy Turner, backstage at the Crescent City Blues Fest, 2008

 The BLUES HIGHWAY Millennium Trail

Community Development Through Music will develop the qualified knowledge and understanding of the region’s music, arts and culture already possessed by residents of these concertedly marginalized neighborhoods, developing this knowledge, understanding and creativity into marketable skills that will provide the products and services the regional culture industries are currently lacking, ranging from marketing, effective branding and promotion, to merchandising for individual artists and groups to booking services and development and production of touring events for the vast regional base of musical and entertainment artists and groups, to entertainment industry transportation services.  This aspect of Community Development Through Music was specifically developed to address the current drain upon our local economy when the area’s higher earning artists contract for these services with businesses located far outside the region, typically in such far away cities as Los Angeles and San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and New York.  This current situation literally drains millions upon millions from New Orleans economy every year.  
    A particularly innovative aspect and strategy of the Community Development Through Music program model is the facilitation of the development of local worker-owned cooperative creative cultural enterprises in conjunction with the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives.  Worker and producer owned cooperative enterprises are democratically run workplaces and businesses that serve to mitigate the abuses of the private market on marginalized neighborhoods when large corporations headquartered elsewhere drain local capital.   This strategy is designed to increase the wealth of our local community, neighborhoods and residents.

HISTORY

    Community Development Through Music  was developed as part of the New Orleans Blues Project, a music and cultural economic development group formed in 1998.  The New Orleans Blues Project provided artist support services to unrepresented New Orleans musicians in need of booking agents, publicists, promoters, merchandisers, etc. The Blues Project provided clerical and contact support, including the development of press kits, press releases and other publicity and promotion, grants for recording CDs, and booking artists into a number of regional, national and international music venues, festivals and private corporate engagements.
Community Development Through Music grew out of these activities and the large need by many regional artists for these services.

In 1999 the Blues Project wrote two grant proposals – one to the Clinton Administration’s White House Millennium Council seeking the BLUES HIGHWAY Millennium Trail designation, received in June, 2000.  The BLUES HIGHWAY Millennium Trail was designed to be a heritage trail and music and cultural economic development initiative of national scope linking New Orleans, the Mississippi Delta, Memphis, St. Louis and Chicago, primarily along Highway 61 and the Mississippi, incorporating the Millennium Trails goal to

“Honor the Past and Imagine the Future”

The second grant application was for development of the COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT THROUGH MUSIC program model submitted to the City of New Orleans Economic Development Fund.  The Blues Project received $10,000. 00 in May 2001 for development, with the request that we apply for separate funds for implementation.  Changes in the political and economic landscape by 2002 caused the program to be shelved.  Recent changes however, have brought renewed interest in the program model and renewed opportunity for implementation.