EASTHAMPTON — Five years in the making, Easthampton City Arts (ECA) has released a guiding plan for arts and culture online, calling on community members to provide feedback about changes they want to see.
The Easthampton Futures Project was a six-month-long series of community visioning sessions, receiving input from close to 500 community members to create a report in 2019. ECA partnered with the design firm Dpict and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, using the feedback to create a community-generated plan of goals and strategies to support city arts and culture for the next 10 years until 2030.
Halfway through the plan’s lifespan, ECA, which turned 20 this year, has launched it online where community members can submit feedback about what they would like to see in the arts and culture community in Easthampton.
The visioning project, launched five years ago, was intended to be a part of Easthampton’s next citywide master plan, a blueprint that has since been split into multiple smaller projects, according to Pasqualina Azzarello, arts and culture program director for the city and ECA. She said the organization intends to use its Futures Project as a guiding light for arts and culture in the city.
The plan includes many strategies for the arts and culture community based on feedback from the visioning sessions. Some include integrating new approaches that seek to address the impacts of gentrification, further access to arts at the municipal level and the fostering of new opportunities for Easthampton artists. One of the goals is to revitalize Easthampton’s Old Town Hall, an ongoing project overseen by CitySpace currently being reconstructed.
Multiple strategies have continued from Easthampton’s separate 2008 Master Plan including the establishment of an arts curriculum in public schools.
Just as the Futures Project was set to be released to the public on March 18, 2020, city offices shut down two days prior due to the COVID-19 pandemic, hitting another hitch in road.
“It was a state of heightened anxiety in our immediate community and in our world and we made the choice to postpone the announcement of this report,” Azzarello said about the pandemic.
During pandemic lockdown, Azzarello said ECA continued to be active. They hosted multiple events working around pandemic restrictions, such as turning parking lots into outdoor music venues and putting artist work in vacant storefront windows. This included an artists grants initiative and the Art Work Space Easthampton studio residency program, hosting artists at both of the galleries they were managing at the time.
“It was clear that artists were losing income because of the state of things so we were trying to be a proactive resource to address the changing needs of our community,” said Azzarello.
Earlier this year, as the 10-year plan approached the halfway mark, Azzarello felt it was the perfect opportunity to share the Easthampton Futures Project report. On Jan. 22, she presented the report to the public in the Blue Room at CitySpace, or Easthampton’s Old Town Hall.
“It was just a real community effort and it was really wonderful to introduce this material publicly for the first time,” said Azzarello.
However, there was one more piece missing.
“Something that was voiced, was people felt strongly that when the report was shared more broadly, community members should be able to continue to respond to the work and give more feedback,” said Azzarello.
Now, the report and feedback form are posted online on the ECA website all in one shared folder and will be reviewed and updated by the ECA coordinating committee during its monthly meetings. The project was backed by the city council, which passed a resolution in March, reinforcing its ongoing support of ECA and the Futures Project.
“That was in prefect alignment with what we had always understood, which is that this work is a living document. This is a living plan. That way we could continue to respond to the feedback,” Azzarello said about involving the community.
Azzarello stressed the importance to have this report constantly changing and meeting the needs of Easthampton community members. She said the ECA is ready to respond to whatever kind of feedback is presented and welcomes feedback about Easthampton arts and culture.
“We created this process with a lot of heart and with a lot of intentionality …” said Azzarello. “We understand that once we began, it was important to be open to what came and not have preconceived notions about what may or may not be said, but be truly receptive.”
