Nevada Arts Council

Values & Vision:  Nevada Arts Council's Strategic Plan, 2010-2015 is the outcome of the Nevada’s Arts Council’s (NAC) ongoing planning process. Arts Town Meetings, focus groups and individual conversations held throughout the state, and print and online surveys provide feedback to NAC on the state of the arts, and agency services.  The strategic plan is submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts and the State of Nevada and guides the work of the agency. Read more about NAC’s planning process.

Values & Vision: 2010 – 2015 summarizes a statewide journey that began soon after the NAC distributed the largest amount of grant dollars in its history, and concluded as the nation’s 21st century recession surfaced. Throughout a two-year period, NAC staff and board traveled nearly 2,000 miles throughout Nevada to engage in formal and informal conversations - at conferences, workshops, focus groups, and community conversations. In public, people responded individually and as a group; in private, through interviews, surveys and evaluations. Values & Vision: 2010–2015 updates the agency’s existing plan, with a focus on both continuity and transformation. It addresses issues that affect the state as a whole, and challenges Nevada’s arts industry to provide creative solutions to the state’s economic, educational and social challenges together.

Conversation about Art
—Ginny Cardenas, February 2009, Written after the Douglas County Community Conversation

We sat in a back-room at the library–
twenty some people, drawn there to converse.
local citizens – artists, and advocates of the arts
come to talk about something we loved.
First we were given the facts and numbers–
grants being cut by as much as eighty percent.
but we were not there for the facts,
we were there for something we loved.
Then something amazing began to happen –
we were guided to turn toward our vision and values.
and people began to share – they spoke openly and with passion
of their hopes and dreams for the town.
Words like “prosperity” and “possibility” flew from lips
and we inhaled them like oxygen – breathing our a new community,
creating something that had never been – a work of art.
I like thinking of life as art. And I like thinking that we are all artists
creating with our thoughts and words in every moment.
these are not facts, mind you, just a conversation between you and me;
a conversation about life and arts – a conversation that might make a difference.

Read: Values and Visions: 2010 - 2015 
Read: Values & Vision: Update of Action Steps, 2008
Read: Values and Vision: 2004 - 2007 
Read: Serving Nevada Artists