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Business Committee for the Arts Inc. partners with the Missoula Cultural Council to link local arts and businesses

Missoula is affiliating with a national organization whose goal is to provide businesses with the resources to build partnerships with the arts and the community.

By MICK HOLIEN of the Missoulian

"There is no business in this city that could not and should not be involved with the arts and cultural tourism. It benefits everybody," said Judith Jedlicka, president of the Business Committee for the Arts Inc., a New York-based organization founded in 1967 by David Rockefeller.

She was in Missoula recently for four days to meet with business, civic and cultural leaders and launch a Business Committee for the Arts chapter after the Missoula Cultural Council http://missoulacultural.org/ spawned the idea.

"It is in everybody’s interest to form these collaborative partnerships so that the economic vitality of the area is raised up and so you’re basically cross-marketing," she said in an interview. Missoula is the smallest community in the nation to affiliate with the committee.

"My mission is to help this community see all the wonderful resources it has. Everything from A to Z, from arboretums to zoos with everything in between," said Jedlicka, who in 2000 was one of 150 Americans to participate in the First Annual White House Conference on Culture and Diplomacy.

The committee works to convince businesses of the intrinsic value of the arts, their value to education, economic development, business and the overall quality of life of a community.

"The thing that is most important about the arts and culture is that they identify a community and they cause a community to flourish and move forward," she said.

"It’s isn’t just the monetary benefits in cultural tourism," added Mark Martin, executive director of the Missoula Cultural Council. "It gives communities a chance to share what’s unique. It inculcates a sense of place. It makes people proud of where they live. It leads to historic preservation and it makes people realize what they have in their community and take better care of it."

He said the match just makes good sense in Missoula.

"There’s a natural connection between the business community and cultural committee in developing tourism on a sustainable year-around basis," he said.

Cultural tourists spend on the average $615 in a visit to an area, some $190 more than a non-cultural visitor, and they return more often, some studies suggest.

"Business is a driver in any economically vibrant community and so are the arts and cultural tourism," said Jedlicka. "Business, arts, cultural tourism partnerships just make good sense."

With tourism’s rapid and accelerated growth in Montana, cultural activities become even more important.

"Missoula’s tourism business depends so much on cultural activities and we define that pretty broadly," said Martin. "It isn’t just the performance arts or the visual arts. It’s our environment that shapes our culture. … Many of our writers and our artists use our natural resource, our environment, the mountains and rivers for their material, so it makes sense to include them in our cultural activities as well."

Added Jedlicka: "I think we have to look at the art and cultural entities in a community as businesses and we have to look at the relationship as business to business partners," she said. "We’re each investing something in that partnership and we’re both going to gain."

Also of importance is the economic value of those employed by the arts, the products and services they purchase and the tax revenue they generate. A recent survey concluded that the arts in the United States generates $134 billion in economic activity, Jedlicka said.

"If a business looks at the arts and what they generate by the number of people they employ, the fact is that for every dollar spent on the arts, four more dollars are generated in the local economy," she said.

The timing for such a venture in Missoula, said Jedlicka, who visited here for the first time, couldn’t be better.

"You have some wonderful art and cultural organizations in this city and I have to say they’re a big secret," she said. "There’s a wonderful bubbling happening in this community … There is such an opportunity right now."

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