Case Study: Burlington City Arts
Sustaining and Enhancing Cultural Life

Burlington City Arts strives to bring awareness of arts and culture into the City's neighborhood, schools, parks and senior centers. Its mission is to sustain and enhance the cultural life of the greater Burlington community, by organizing and sponsoring cultural events and programs and forming partnership with other organizations, which carry out community arts events and add to the city's public art.

City Arts transformed the historic Ethan Allan En-gine Company Number Four into the Firehouse Center for Visual Arts. Beside ongoing exhibitions the Firehouse Gallery offers life drawing classes, art tours for students of all ages and Summer Arts, a four-week-long children's summer art camp.

Burlington City Arts also awards Community Arts Project Grants (CAPS) to a variety of artists and community organizations, such as painting programs for seniors, site specific environmental art projects and an internet band guide showcasing local musicians. These grants offer financial support to local artists by offering performance and exhibition space and through grants of $4,000 – 8,000. To increase funding City Arts launched the "one percent for Caps" program, in which downtown restaurants donate one percent of their net profits on the first Friday of every month to the CAPS program. Other City arts programs include the First Friday Art Trolley Tours and the weekly Fine Art Flea Market.

In addition, City Arts sponsors and supports an ar-ray of Burlington's festivals, events and programs, such as the Battery Park Free Summer Concert Se-ries, the Burlington Stage and Screen Awards Din-ner, the Discover Jazz Festival, the Vermont Sym-phony Orchestra (VSO) Symphony Kids program and the Head Start Arts program.

Cross Sectoral Benefits

Environment: Support of site-specific environmental art projects.

Economy: Integrating local downtown businesses into the cultural community life through financial donation, collaboration of cultural events and programs.

Governance: Support partnership and
collaboration with other community organizations.

Social: Sustain and enhance the cultural life for all the citizens of the greater Burlington community