Why Creativity Matters

At Creative West, supporting creativity is what we do.

We’re a nonprofit US Regional Arts Organization that builds equitable technology, funding, advocacy, and policy systems to generate creative capacity in the West and beyond.

We offer direct, practical support to artists, culture bearers, state arts agencies, and creative organizations, serving a vast region that stretches from the Arctic Coast to the Desert Southwest, and from the Great Plains to the Pacific Islands.

We focus on distributive action that shares information and resources with communities. We support goals directly — seeking partnership, not power — knowing that the region contains multitudes.

The practice and support of creativity takes place in a layered and prismatic landscape, and so our direct-service work includes funding, programming, leadership development, research, advocacy, and convening to move arts and cultural policy forward.

Structurally, the creative sector ranges from informal and relational, to institutional and dependent. Our programs reflect, support, and at times challenge that. By building systems that change systems, we advance equity, justice, and regenerative action — seeing these values as essential as creativity itself.

The West and its people are connected and remote, practical and imaginative, at the forefronts of cultural preservation, presentation, and transformation. Here, living traditions in art, design, craftsmanship and storytelling contribute to, and stand apart from, a globally connected creative economy.

Creativity has long been part of the West’s regional identity. It’s a deeply important aspect of who we are and how we meet the world. When we support artists and creators in our region, we generate cultural, social and economic value regionally as well as everywhere our ideas travel.

At Creative West, we know that creativity is socially valuable and essential to us all. We support the people and organizations who make it happen, in the US West and beyond.