- Securing Space
Breaking Ground: A New Chapter in the Rockies
This next chapter of Breaking Ground follows CAST’s expansion into Colorado, where we’re deepening our focus on affordable space for arts and culture.
Community ofPractice
We engage organizations and leaders across the United States and internationally to exchange knowledge and build new solutions for our common challenges.
6th on 7th Gallery Director S. Renée Jones and Community Engagement Manager Patricia Zamora, photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Noonan Building artists attend a planning workshop facilitated by CAST and Jensen Architects, May 2023.
Community is at the heart of all that CAST does.
Our work to secure and steward space for sustainability is meaningless without community participation and agency.
While the challenge of real estate affordability is global, we understand that solutions must be rooted in place, taking into account the local context and lived experiences of local artists and cultural workers.
We are informed and inspired by the people who live on our block, the local businesses where we shop, and the cultural practices that make our communities home. We are on the ground listening, activating, convening, and consulting with artists to identify community needs and engage arts leaders to shape solutions.
How we engage
The three pillars of our community of practice
We engage local communities in the places we work, meeting with artists, organizations, and cultural workers to understand their needs, pair them with resources and referrals, and make new connections that help anchor the arts.
We also bring our approaches and models to other communities, providing technical real estate assistance to reset the floor of affordability for organizations and the communities they engage.
We engage with organizations in the places we work to build knowledge about real estate, increase real estate readiness, and build agency. We also exchange knowledge with our peers in the community land trust movement and social purpose real estate community.
We’ve participated in international symposiums around creative economies and equitable ownership structures with our peers Community Vision, Global Cultural Districts Network, SPUR, and cultural trusts in Calgary and New Zealand. Through our participation in the Creative Land Trust Summit, we share our lessons learned to support the development of new tools like the Creative Land Trust toolkit to continue modeling new ways to anchor the arts.
We partner to develop creative solutions that are responsive to local community needs based on relationships and referrals.
Collaborative problem-solving is a fundamental part of CAST’s story—from our Dreaming Spaces program that provided a process and framework for bringing artists, developers, and designers together to collectively design spaces to our engagement with government agencies to keep artists’ affordability challenges at the forefront of decision-making.
Building on our roots in the SF Bay Area, we are expanding our work to new places. CAST-inspired ventures have emerged in major cities across the world from London, Sydney, and Vancouver to Austin and Seattle. While local contexts require deep connectivity and lived experience in place, we have been invited by other cities to explore ways we can partner with organizations and policymakers across the country to develop creative solutions that are responsive to local community needs.
All of CAST’s work is rooted in and powered by the belief that we can build a better system – one that recognizes the essential role of arts and culture in communities and creates a long-term engine for ensuring artists and cultural workers can stay anchored where they create.
Securing and stewarding space is one piece of the puzzle, but we can only create a new paradigm when we address the problems of unaffordability and displacement at the root. Through efforts like the Space to Dream Initiative, we are building long-term financing solutions and advancing policy change that will fundamentally reshape the future of our cities.
Featured community stories
- Securing Space
Monocle: What happens when a city decides that its cultural scene is worth saving?
London’s cultural crisis hotline is rescuing studios, theatres and music venues from closure – and New York is taking notice. Could this be the future of urban creative survival?
- Community of Practice
Dreaming Together: 5 Takeaways from a Season of Conferences & Events
The CAST team reflects on recent gatherings with cultural space leaders across North America and beyond—sharing key takeaways, ongoing questions, and what it means to build for collective ownership.
- Community of Practice
Expanding Our Community: Longer-Term Impacts of Dreaming Spaces at Pier 70
CAST shares how it partnered with the Noonan Artists and the broader arts community to create a vision and goals for the new arts center at Pier 70, and how it continues to shape future projects.
Invest in CAST
Scaling solutions with real economic and cultural impact.
Space alone doesn’t sustain culture. We have seen too many times what happens when exciting space acquisitions stall in pre-development or when adaptive reuse projects fail to come to fruition due to financing challenges.
The most critical aspects of sustainable cultural real estate—strong governance, finance, and operations—are often the most invisible and under-resourced.
CAST is bridging this gap, helping leaders prepare for the realities of a real estate project by building a strong foundation.
Help us build the playbook for the future by investing in CAST.