By Clara Snyder | Staff Writer
A nonprofit organization formed in 2015, Creative Waco aims to support a thriving cultural and creative community in Waco.
For a decade prior to 2015, the City of Waco aspired to raise the bar for cultural development. No entity existed to undertake the task until Creative Waco executive Fiona Bond was brought by Baylor from Scotland to Waco with her husband and two kids.
“My husband was being recruited by Baylor, and at the time, we were very settled in Scotland,” Bond said. “We decided to at least look at that option, and Baylor was kind enough to bring us both out and introduce us to people they thought we would want to connect with in order to make that decision.”
In Scotland, Bond’s work lied within the context of how communities change when they invest strategically and consciously in artistic and cultural developments in four United Kingdom cities. Bond said her experience in this area spurred invitations into conversations for the cultural and creative development in Waco.
“There was a lot of underdeveloped opportunity [in Waco], and there was a lack of strategic alignment on how resources will be deployed to grow our artistic and cultural identity,” Bond said.
According to Bond, Creative Waco’s mission is oriented around the goals of its cultural plan — a lens through which potential and existing projects shine.
“To form the cultural plan, we brought together all of the stakeholders and partners from across our community who had undertaken cultural consultation and strategic planning over the previous decade,” Bond said. “That became the blueprint for what we, as an organization, would do.”
Soledad Bautista, director of professional development and outreach, said another goal Creative Waco has is using inclusion, equity and diversity to establish a more cohesive ecosystem in the city. She also said that in a cohesive ecosystem, all of the pieces that compose the city can speak with each other and collaboratively grow toward the same goals.
“[Our goal is] for people to have more of the core values aligned so that this city, as a whole, can move forward in one direction,” Bautista said.
Bond said with the work they do, Creative Waco is fundamentally about the transformation that happens in people and places through the arts. She also said creativity is a way to flex intellectual muscles for problem-solving and reimagining the way people do things.
“Whether that be the way we connect with each other, how we think about the place we live, how we think about each other … reimagining those things changes us as human beings,” Bond said. “Fundamentally, the arts are about challenging ourselves to be better humans — more connected, more imaginative, more aspirational.”
According to Bautista, a project called Air Collaborative led her to take the job at Creative Waco. The award-winning program, already working throughout the nation, is the first project of its kind to be done bilingually on a national level.
“Air Collaborative builds design thinking in communities that are under-resourced or have difficulty with community conversations,” Bautista said. “Through this work, they build programs specifically for the community, with people from the community.”
ARTPrenticeship is another program Creative Waco brought to the community. Geared toward the younger demographic, Bautista said the program allows middle and high school students to see what it’s like to make the commitment of being an artist.
“ARTPrenticeship starts with having businesses or people commission young artists to do a project,” Bautista said. “Then, program director Stefanie Wheat-Johnson trains these youngsters in learning how to write a budget, [manage] safety precautions and things that they need to communicate with the city.”
Bautista said following ARTPrenticeship was the project Chalk Waco, which brought roughly 12,000 people to town last year.
According to Bautista, Chalk Waco is another way to expand artist portfolios in the area and help mix businesses or big institutions from town with artists for commission projects.
“[Chalk Waco] is putting people from the community with organizations that have the funds for artists to display their work as a promotion for the business, and as a promotion for the artists because of the quality of work they do,” Bautista said.
In December 2021, an article from the Waco Tribune-Herald said a $250,000 grant aimed at pandemic recovery efforts for the arts was awarded to Creative Waco by the National Endowment for the Arts.
“We were hugely privileged and honored to be the only small city in Texas to be selected for the program and one of the only small cities across the whole of the U.S. to be selected,” Bond said.
Bond also said Waco was a city that stood out to the National Endowment for the Arts for making sure artists and creatives kept receiving support in one way or another during the pandemic.
“We also did a lot of advocacy work across the state and national level to point out that cities our size are falling through the cracks in terms of opportunity,” Bond said. “The way that funding was structured nationally meant it tended to gravitate toward the larger cities, particularly in the case of the rescue plan funding, [which] tended to favor the larger cities.”
Additionally, as the current president of Texans for the Arts, Bond said she has done a lot of efficacy work for the arts and cultural sector at the state level. Through this, Bond said they have found that larger cities often get very tied up in political disputes, making it difficult to deploy funding in a way that is genuinely beneficial for the entire population.
“In Waco, our local government at city level does not run on party political platforms,” Bond said. “[Waco] is able to keep politics more oriented around local priorities and goals. This means when you have funding available for programs like the National Endowment for the Arts, we can do a really good job of making sure that it’s genuinely equitably distributed.”
Bond said her future aspirations for Creative Waco include strengthening arts and cultural organizations, capturing support from a diverse stream of revenue sources and being sustainable as it grows further. Creative Waco is also developing practical pathways for people to incorporate arts and cultural development into other sectors.
“For example, we have a program which gives talented high schoolers apprenticeships with professional artists to take a creative idea from concept to completion,” Bond said. “Often, 80% of them are the first in their family to consider post-high school education, and the practical outputs of that program are murals across our city.”
Additionally, Bond said Creative Waco is currently working with the city, stakeholders and partners in the community to develop a performing arts center as part of the cultural infrastructure.
“The first thing we learn in the Bible is God created, and the first thing we learned about ourselves is that we’re created in that image,” Bond said. “It’s a constant reminder that we are created to create. It doesn’t always take the form of art, but art is one of the most powerful toolkits we have to flex [our] divine ability.”
To find out more about Creative Waco and upcoming events, visit its website here.
