Lead Curriculum Consultant RFP

AIR Call for Community Involvement

AIR Curriculum Summit

Fact sheet about AIR

Executive Summary of the AIR Business Plan

We live in a complicated and challenging world. Art and creativity provide a bridge between differences, a platform for sharing experiences, emotions and ideas, and new ways of solving problems. Art provides solace and healing, inspiration and hope. Through music, writing, visual and performing arts, we express pain and sorrow, celebrate beauty and love, and explore spirituality, life and death. We laugh and cry together without bias. Creativity helps humanity thrive.

The Arts Incubator of the Rockies

The Arts Incubator of the Rockies (AIR) is a revolutionary partnership between Beet Street, The City of Fort Collins Cultural Services Department, and The Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Advocacy, and Performance Institute for the Arts (LEAP) at Colorado State University (CSU).

There are thousands of extraordinary artists, arts organizations and creative business people in the Intermountain West region. Many of us choose to live here because of the creativity that our natural environment inspires us to create. We cherish our small town life and enjoy solitude. But isolation, lack of access to professional development opportunities and experts, and limited markets for our work holds our careers back. Artists are not making living wages and some arts organizations are on the verge of closing their doors.

In 2010, Beet Street, an arts non-profit, the Fort Collins City Cultural Services Department, and LEAP Institute for the Arts at CSU joined together to find solutions to the problems facing the arts community in our small city in Northern Colorado. We researched professional development programs, arts and business incubators across the country, and explored new distance learning and social networking technologies. We also reviewed the challenges facing the arts communities in states in the Intermountain West region and discovered that we had common problems to solve.

We also realized that Fort Collins had some incredible assets – strong local political and community support for the arts, creative financing from our Downtown Development Authority, a City-owned Carnegie Library Building, progressive university administrators in the LEAP Institute for the Arts at CSU, and talented staff and passion. In the spirit of shared prosperity, we realized that our local assets could be leveraged to support and grow a much larger area. Economies of scale and technological advancements could make our local investment in curriculum, distance learning classrooms, expert speakers, and networking grow the entire region.

AIR will provide education, resources, and support to elevate our region’s artistic careers and organizations. Because their success is everyone’s gain.

AIR will also offer administrative services, professional resources, gallery, and performance spaces to students and professionals to assist them in creating, redefining, and sustaining their creative careers in the new economy.

AIR is the only full-service arts incubator in the Intermountain West and the only one in the nation associated with a major land grant university. LEAP Institute for the Arts has made an important philosophical shift in the way they plan to teach their students.  AIR and LEAP are joining forces thru an innovative internship program that will connect students with working professionals.

Most importantly, AIR intends to utilize new technologies and distance-learning opportunities that will provide rural communities with professional development training and regional networking that will strengthen the arts throughout the Intermountain West.  Artists will have the skills, mentors and community connections to succeed.