Washington D.C

”What blocks do you remove to make it easier to start initiatives?” Mr McNulty from Partners of Livable Community looks at us intensively and repeats. ”What blocks does your society need to remove to welcome people?” Immigrants will form forty percent of all small businesses in US, he tells us. “Who will welcome these people? Probably Art and Culture”. Anne L’Ecuyer from Americans for the Arts concluded her speech by saying that the role of structures to let innovation take place, is to make sure of two things. Get out of the way. And get rid of the blocks.

Three interesting seminars was arranged by the Region of Västra Götaland and University of Göteborg in Washington on May 10-13 2008 on ”Mutual Benefits”, ”Building on Thin Air?” and ”Artistic Entrepreneurship”. The seminar took place at the House of Sweden and several interesting initiatives, organisations and Universities from both USA and Sweden discussed Art and culture as a resource for social transformation, new partnership building and the need for interdisciplinary environments, Art Universities and how they should deal with entrepreneurship and much more.

You can download the speech held by Nätverkstan here: natverkstan.pdf

An article in Swedish about the event is also found at the website University of Göteborg.

Partners for Livable Community

Americans for the Arts

Artomatic

American University

The John F Kennedy Center for Performing Arts

Arena Stage

National Children’s Museum of America

The Region of Västra Götaland

Vara Concert Hall

Film i Väst

Nordic Watercolour Museum

Göteborg Universitet

Jonsereds Herrgård

2 Responses to “Washington D.C”

Migration and entrepreneurs (October 12th, 2008 at 5:20 pm)

[...] McNulty from the Americans for the Arts said on a seminar earlier this spring (read here) that 40% of all small businesses in the US is formed by immigrants. In Sweden the figure is about [...]
Forum for Creative Regions and Cities (April 23rd, 2009 at 9:40 am)

[...] soon be posted on this website. Other posts connected to this are for instand Robert McNulty from America for the Arts, on Migration and Entrepreneurs, the seminar in Barcelona in January on the same topic, and [...]