Thrive 2055, in partnership with the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Southeast Tennessee Development District, and ArtsBuild, on Tuesday announced that the communities of Chatsworth, Cleveland, Cohutta, Dalton, Ducktown, Fort Payne, Rossville, and South Pittsburg have been selected to participate in its inaugural Thriving Communities program.
The program will serve communities in Northeast Alabama, Northwest Georgia and Southteast Tennessee seeking to grow their economy through locally driven asset-based strategies.
"We are thrilled at the overwhelming response received by communities interested in leveraging their arts and culture for heightened prosperity," said Bridgett Massengill, executive director of Thrive 2055.
"The participants see this as a way to learn what resources are available and collaborate with neighboring towns across the region with successful projects and a common love for their communities and the arts."
Each applicant community formed a volunteer team of local citizens, representing diverse professions and interests, to participate in a three month design thinking crash course. The course will be facilitated by Bridge Innovate, a Chattanooga firm that specializes in the emerging discipline of design thinking, a creative visioning process with tangible goals.
The Thriving Communities crash course will facilitate the design thinking process for the teams to develop economic development strategies utilizing arts and culture assets. Upon successful completion of the course, each participating community will be eligible to receive up to $20,000 in funding from the Lyndhurst Foundation to implement a tangible arts and culture project identified through the course.
"We are truly excited by the positive response of communities who understand the potential of the arts to create vibrancy in their towns. Arts and culture-based projects can bring communities together in really powerful ways, and are often a catalyst of activity and change. We look forward to working with each of these communities and learning about the creative resources they already have and their ideas to build upon them" said Kathleen Nolte, program officer for the Lyndhurst Foundation.
The eight selected communities were chosen through a competitive selection process based on four core criteria: community need, community impact, strength and professional diversity of the proposed team and probability of success. Applications were reviewed and selected by a committee of business, nonprofit and arts leaders from the Southeast Tennessee Development District, ArtsBuild, Thrive 2055 and the Lyndhurst Foundation.
Thriving Communities is an action step toward advancing the regional vision of "educated people with good jobs living in a great place." The project will help ensure the Chattanooga tri-state region will be one where people are making the most of their economic opportunities while preserving what is special about their home communities.