By Eliza Tudor

Since Grass Valley-Nevada City Cultural District and Truckee Cultural District were inaugurated seven years ago, we have asked ourselves how public-private partnerships might best serve our citizens.

These partnerships, at their best, spur pride of place and entrepreneurship. They offer the artist much-needed security and freedom to innovate, and they position our sector as a community solution partner. At the very least, they are a standard survival technique for all non-profit leaders for whom partnering is hardwired into our DNA.

But what conditions drive such partnerships? It’s generally considered that a mixed economy favors the arts, through which public, private and self-generated funding enables organizations to weather recessions, navigate pandemics and adapt to swings in audience behavior. 

Yet this “balance” is tenuous and assumes standard conditions, which in rural spaces can’t be relied upon. Cut the public element in a mixed economy when other funding is already under pressure and watch the creative sector flounder.

This has never been more apparent than now, in the years following the pandemic, when recovery funds have dried up and consumers of culture have more choice than ever about how to invest in, and experience, the arts. And, in response, we’re seeing an uptick in local public-private partnerships.

Up in the High Sierra—with views of Mount Rose, Northstar and the Pacific Crest—Truckee Tahoe Airport District is one of only nine Special Airport Districts in California. Through our collaboration with the Town of Truckee, Truckee Arts Alliance and Truckee Chamber, we now show and offer for sale the work of at least 200 artists annually in the Airport’s expansive community areas.

In Western Nevada County, Art at the Airport is mirrored by Art in Public Spaces, hosted by the County of Nevada at the Rood Center in Nevada City. Showcasing the work of the same number of artists and multiple agency partners, we love the idea that you could be visiting your County HQ to attend a Board of Supervisors meeting, pay a tax bill or vote, and find yourself face to face with an exhibition of work that blows your mind and simultaneously makes you feel at home.

As Nevada County Arts Council closed out 2024 with its final exhibition Artists@Work!, we looked back at two years of public-private partnerships as an exercise in community capacity-building across nineteen counties. In service to the California Arts Council, we re-granted $3.38 million through the California Creative Corps Program, funding projects that would help local communities across government, social services and the non-profit sectors tackle issues closest to home.

Through artist residencies, the role of the artist was to interpret and make accessible complex issues and solutions, provide a human dimension to help bridge gaps in public understanding, and build empathy. The result has been a phenomenal uptick in awareness, from which new visions towards climate mitigation and environmental stewardship, food justice, public health access, and affordable housing—to name but a few themes—have sprung up.

Senator Toni Atkins, who visited Grass Valley last year to attend the raising of the roof for InConcert Sierra’s new Crown Point Ventures project, said: “Look, I think government should be about support for communities. All communities… I grew up in a rural community, and we didn't have access to this.”

These days, our municipalities are rising to the challenge in small and significant ways. The City of Grass Valley recently voted in favor of investing in the Student Matinee Program at the Center for the Arts, supporting its work to expose just under a thousand school children to professional theater, reducing financial barriers and ensuring no cost to participating schools. With the state weathering a huge budget deficit, and grant funding scant, it’s great that the City has picked up the slack.

The City of Nevada City, meanwhile, has inaugurated a public arts commission and—initially coached by The Town of Truckee through its own commission—is making great strides at embracing art as an essential part of civic life and community engagement.

For the creative sector, perhaps the most significant public-private partnerships in 2025 will be the result of our work leading Nevada County’s first ever Arts & Culture Action Plan. Through Culture Forward, and centering your voice, we’ll be working with local government to build upon and align with existing strands of work, such as the County’s new Economic Development Action Plan, its Community Wildfire Protection Plan, its Recreation and Resiliency Master Plan, the Sierra Economic Development District’s Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy, and our own recently published Arts & Economic Prosperity Report.

Local public-private partnerships matter, and so does proper acknowledgement of the arts as a driver of positive economic and social impacts. With such uncertainty in the air, these partnerships will become more important in the coming years as a means of filling the gap between the need for public services and programs that engage, and the will or capacity of local government to pay for them. After all, we’re all in this together.

Eliza Tudor is Executive Director of Nevada County Arts Council.