As of October 2009, a new chapter in Austin Circle of Theaters’ 35-year history opens as it restructures its organization, expands its services and embraces a wider mission to serve Austin’s richly diverse and adventuresome creative community across all sectors as the Greater Austin Creative Alliance.

Forming a community-based Creative Alliance to provide essential services and networking opportunities to artists and creative individuals, organizations, and businesses is one of the key recommendations of the CreateAustin Master Plan. It is a recommendation that repeatedly emerged from many different task forces that met in our city’s 16-month cultural planning process. It is a recommendation that Austin Circle of Theaters immediately took to heart.

Our creative community cited the need for advocacy, collaboration, marketing, professional development and capacity building — all services ACoT was providing within the performing arts community. Could ACoT provide those services to others?

A study group of key community stakeholders in different disciplines was formed. Nationally respected experts in arts management such as Kevin McCarthy (Arts and Culture in the Metropolis: Strategies for Sustainability) Stephen Tepper (Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of American’s Cultural Life, with Bill Ivey), and Tom Kaiden, COO of Philadelphia Cultural Alliance were brought in for conversations with the study group and the wider arts community. The group also explored successful models in other cities such as the Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and 1st Act Silicon Valley.

In the same time period ACoT established NowPlayingAustin.com, a community arts and cultural portal that now serves more than 900 organizations in the greater Austin region, and attracts 20,000 visitors per month; it expanded its ticketing services to increase its earned income; it instituted a city wide celebration of Arts, Culture, and Creativity in honor of National Arts and Humanities Month called Get Your Art On that has more than 200 organizations participating; and it doubled its staff.

Simultaneously the CreateAustin Leadership Team reconstituted several task forces, including the Creative Alliance, and encouraged an open and collaborative relationship with ACoT and its efforts on behalf of establishing a Creative Alliance.

This past summer Andrew Taylor, Director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration (artfulmanager.com) came to be with the performing arts community and wider arts community and CreateAustin stakeholders. He presented on the theme of “Considering the Creative Ecology.” The message: What are you waiting for? The Alliance is already here. It is all of you.

So now we begin — all of us.

The mission of the Greater Austin Creative Alliance is to advance, connect and celebrate Austin’s creative life in order to strengthen our creative economy and benefit the well-being of our community. Join us.