Roanoke’s experts in attracting new businesses are examining a fresh premise that local arts and culture can help score more jobs.
This month, a local arts and cultural partnership premiered a multimedia presentation that intrigued Roanoke’s lead municipal economic developer.
A newly created video features a song about creativity and art, performed from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Bridge and other downtown spots. Viewers of “It’s Here” see rolling footage of dancing, singing, parades and shows, plus a street-level look at outdoor murals and sculpture from the city’s public art collection.
Roanoke boosters commonly pitch expansion-minded industries with data about building sites, incentives and lifestyle amenities such as hiking and beer, yet with less said about the arts. The new presentation gives city officials a ready-to-use media package to plug this gap.
People are also reading…
“This is the sort of angle that’s been missing from a lot of our promotional stuff,” said Marc Nelson, who directs the Roanoke Department of Economic Development.
Nelson said in an interview that his office will begin studying ways to incorporate the arts and culture in its marketing of the city as a place for business investment. A new website page about arts and cultural is live at bizroanoke.com/about-roanoke/living-in-roanoke/arts.
The project grew from a conversation between Shaleen Powell, who directs the Roanoke Cultural Endowment, and Doug Jackson, Roanoke’s arts and culture coordinator, about fashioning a promotional project.
“The outdoors have been branded beautifully,” Powell said. “Let’s package the arts. Because we have such a strong concentration, such a high concentration of arts for a city of our size, but it’s never been packaged and said, ‘Hey, check this out.’”
She added: “I feel like the arts has always been one of those bullet points under quality of life. Something that needs to be demonstrated even stronger, or brighter, or louder is that the arts are just as important.”
Powell turned to TV producer and nonprofit marketer Michael Hemphill. Hemphill’s firm, Buzz4Good LLC, produces the TV show “Buzz,” which features nonprofit organizations from the Roanoke and New River valleys and elsewhere in half-hour weekly segments that air on Blue Ridge PBS. In conjunction with each show, the featured nonprofit receives pro bono marketing services to attract more donors, volunteers and clients to their cause.
The upshot: Hemphill has been working on six episodes tied to arts and culture, a $60,000 project, with the endowment paying half from pandemic relief funds the endowment received from the city and Buzz4Good raising a like amount from corporate and other sponsors.
To catch what you might have missed, the shows are available free on the web, including at https://buzz4good.com/episodes.
The project intersects with the issue of economic growth in the city in the Buzz episode of June 21, which explores the proposition that Nelson’s shop can take greater advantage of the arts and culture as a business attractant and engine of economic activity and growth. Arts and culture generate $64 million of local economic activity a year and support 1,775 jobs locally, according to research.
The Buzz audience heard from the director of the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute in Roanoke. “The arts is an extremely important part of the lives of scientists as well. Most people I don’t think know that,” Michael Friedlander said. “Without it, we would not be nearly as successful.”
During creation of the June 21 segment, Hemphill’s team lined up J.P. Powell, a musician and restaurateur, and actor, poet and hip-hop performer Bryan “Harvest Blaque” Hancock to come up with a song and video. Dan Mirolli, the director of photography and editing at Buzz4Good, hit the streets in early May and brought back footage of numerous arts and culture events going on at the time.
The video is a striking, three-minute survey of culture and art as it unfolds year-around in the city. Powell’s music and Hancock’s lyrics and performance tie it all together.
It’s “about the power of creativity and art, and the symbiotic relationship between the artist and the place the artist calls home. Roanoke both inspires artists and is inspired by them in return, in ways that often go undefined and unexplored,” Hemphill said by email. “Art gives a community meaning and beauty and identity, and we all prosper because of it.”
Hemphill captured Nelson’s first reaction to the video in a Zoom call that has since been made public.
Nelson, a longtime economic department employee who became its chief in 2021, said his office does not incorporate the arts and culture in marketing the city as a place to do business. But he sounded intrigued by the possibility of doing so.
“We often say if we could just get them here and they could see what life is like here,” Nelson said. “Now we have a video that can serve as that piece, that, ‘This is why you should come’ rather than us trying to convince you to come.”