Urbanowski: The arts are key to building a strong, resilient Silicon Valley

I have spent my entire career, and in fact most of my life, at the intersection of arts and community development. While I spent my childhood and the first 15 years or so of my professional life in theater, I have always believed creating and presenting art, regardless of discipline, is about community building, storytelling and social change.

As the leader of Silicon Valley Creates — Santa Clara County’s arts agency and a convener, promoter, incubator and funder of the local arts ecosystem — it is this belief that drives my focus on building a regional network of leaders, artists, culture workers and funders that harnesses the power of the arts to build bridges, empower youth, fuel economic activity, activate public spaces, nurture joy and address some of the major challenges we face as a community. It is not a modest set of objectives, I know, but one worthy of our time and resources and we do this work with many partners.

We are lucky to partner with leaders in our local municipalities and at the state level who understand the importance of art.

While Florida Gov. Ron De Santis just eliminated $32 million in arts grants, vetoing a budget approved by state legislators, our California lawmakers provided critical leadership and support earlier this year to push back against a proposal to reduce state arts funding by 75% and successfully negotiated with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office to restore funding that will help ensure access to arts for all throughout our diverse state.

While California’s projected budget deficit understandably demanded tough decisions on spending, our state arts agency is already functioning at a desperately low level – just under $1 per person to serve the entire state. That makes us 35th in state arts funding in the United States. New York invests more than $5 per capita, and Minnesota spends more than $9 per person. So while we appreciate our partners’ and elected leaders’ recent defense of our state arts funding, we remain painfully aware we are far from making the kind of investment our communities deserve.

I am delighted and honored to make this first contribution as a guest columnist for San José Spotlight. A big thank you to the Spotlight team for acknowledging the importance of the arts in the development of our community and giving me an opportunity to write about it.

In this column I hope to surface the ways in which the arts intersect with and uplift other aspects of a strong and thriving community — and ways in which arts and cultural policy help build community and individual health. From mental health and education to economic impact and urban vibrancy, from cultural preservation to social cohesion, public investment in the arts contributes to the solutions our leaders seek.

Arts and culture work is hard and not for the faint of heart, and so is leading and championing the health of our local community through challenging times. I look forward to offering new ways to think about how the arts can be a part of our collective solutions. My hope is to “move the needle” together.

Alexandra Urbanowski is CEO of SV Creates, the state and county designated arts service organization and local arts agency for Santa Clara County. She serves on the leadership committee for the California Coalition of County Art Agencies and is vice chair of the board at the School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza. Her columns appear every first Wednesday of the month. Contact Alexandra at [email protected].