The Cultural Alliance of Niagara (CAN) is a member-powered collaborative that positions Niagara County’s flourishing arts and cultural sector as a vital regional asset and visitor destination, essential to the region’s economic success and quality of life. In partnership with Arts Services Inc., CAN is seeking Requests for Proposals for the “Assessment and Capacity Building for the Cultural Alliance of Niagara (CAN).”
CAN is seeking proposals from qualified and experienced organizations or individual consultants to strategically assess and empathetically understand the needs of the Niagara County arts and cultural ecosystem and to develop a plan to build capacity for further development, promotion, and implementation of arts and cultural efforts under the Cultural Alliance of Niagara.
Niagara County is a region defined by the agriculture and tourism industries and its long manufacturing history. Niagara County draws millions of tourists each year who come to see Niagara Falls and other outdoor attractions. Destination marketing efforts, specifically in the City of Niagara Falls, concentrate on the outdoor adventure experience and lack comprehensive messaging that include arts and cultural organizations. Additionally, the region contains a vast rural landscape that creates a disconnect among arts and cultural organizations resulting in siloed and duplicative outputs.
This project aims to provide the groundwork for a larger effort to develop a cultural plan for the Niagara County region, under the stewardship of CAN. The results of this project will lay the groundwork to identify unifying strengths and areas of opportunities for the arts and cultural organizations across the region and better equip CAN in its work towards a comprehensive cultural plan. (This project will not develop that cultural plan.)
This RFP was initiated by Fund for the Arts (FFA) – a funders’ cooperative of public, private, family, and corporate foundations administered by the Community Foundation of Greater Buffalo. They have engaged arts and cultural coalitions across Western New York in support of the creation of regional cultural plans. In their collaborative spirit, FFA has kept CAN informed of the other WNY regions’ cultural planning efforts and have expressed a funding opportunity to amplify CAN’s work on this front.
Read the full Request for Proposals here.
