The meeting of the parts, Arts and Culture Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us in the Parts Arts and Culture Committee starting now.

Parks Art and Culture Committee, the best committee.

And I will start with introductions with Council President to my left.

Thank you.

Good morning, Amanda Sandoval, Northwest Denver District 1.

Good morning, Garrett Watson, City Council District 9.

Good morning, Diana Romero Campbell, Southeast Denver District 4.

Great.

And I will just love to introduce our guests from CBCA.

If you can introduce yourself and your organization and go ahead and take it away.

Absolutely.

Where do I look?

Look at us.

Okay.

Sorry.

Hi everyone.

I'm Meredith Badler.

I'm the deputy director at the Colorado Business Committee for the Arts, the CBCA.

And I'm delighted to be with you today.

I have a bunch of data to share, but also some important stories, some calls to action, some ideas for you all to take back to your individual districts and collectively as Denver City Council and members of this committee.

Some things I think you'll be interested in.

So with that, I will I'll dive in.

So just a little bit about CBCA.

I'm actually with some familiar faces in the room.

But for those that don't know, CBCA is a nonprofit organization.

We're a 501c3.

So we are not part of city government or state government.

We're not a funder, which gives us a lot of flexibility to do the work we do, which is to advance Colorado's creative economy by connecting arts and business.

We do that on a statewide level, though we are based here in Denver, but we do get to travel around a bit.

And we've been doing that work for 40 years.

That's what this beautiful, beautiful graphic indicates there.

And we uh we're a membership organization.

We do advocacy research, which I'll share a little bit more about, uh various programs, training, arts engagement, and volunteer opportunities.

A little bit more, these are just some of our programs.

We're a small and mighty team of three that do a lot again on a uh metro and statewide level, again, connecting businesses and their employees to arts and culture, either through free tickets or leadership training.

We help artists with the business side of their practice, so connecting them to pro bono legal assistance or business skills trainings, and then we do uh advocacy work really to elevate arts, culture, and the creative industries and its value.

So, whether that's our economic research, which I'm here to talk about, actually lobbying a little bit at the state legislature, our annual business for the arts awards, and a variety of other things that we are honored to get asked to help with.

So, this is really what I'm here uh to share.

Um, CBCA has been quantifying the value of arts, culture, and scientific nonprofit organizations for over 30 years.

Uh, we have been doing this economic activity study every other year since 1993.

It has always been done in partnership with the SCFD, the scientific and cultural facilities district.

That's our special taxing district that covers the seven counties of the metro area that funds uh about 300 nonprofit organizations from the zoo and the Denver Art Museum and the Botanic Gardens to our mid-size organizations, the Symphony, the Colorado Ballet, to small community-based, all volunteer organizations in arts, culture, and the creative industries, arts, culture, and and science.

Uh, so we've been partnering with the SCFD uh to collect this data and talk about the impact of those organizations.

Uh what else do I want to say about this study?

Here we go.

So again, it's biennial.

This is who we're talking about.

Um, because we do this study every other year.

I'm gonna show you data from 2024, and then we're able to make comparisons back to the prior study, which had data from 2022, as well as 2019, as well as some of our longitudinal trends.

So, this report was really helping us look at sort of the impact of the pandemic and kind of that long tail and where we are now.

So you'll see us make comparisons to sort of pre-pandemic levels in 2019, that bounce back, and then I think 2025.

Anecdotally, we're seeing some of these trends continue, and some interesting and frankly concerning ways.

I think it's important just to also clarify what is not included in this study.

So this is just looking at those SCFD organizations.

So it doesn't include Red Rocks.

It doesn't include Taylor Swift at whichever arena she performed at.

So just know I'm gonna show you some uh what I think are pretty impressive numbers when we talk about economic impact and jobs and attendance in arts and culture, and just know that if we were to include the entire for-profit creative industries and beyond, those numbers would actually be exponentially larger.

Um any questions before I dive into the numbers?

You can just get through the presentation, we'll make people ask questions after.