Creative West

With support from the national endowment for the arts, creative west maintains a tour west and regional engagement program, which funds arts touring. "tourwest," supports the touring of performing artists across the west. The program is designed to serve small communities, and is heavily oriented towards supporting performing arts presented in small rural communities. With grants up to $5,000, these grants are modest in nature but have made a significant difference in smaller communities where contributions from government and business have diminished greatly in recent years. Additionally, private funders have supported additional granting programs managed by creative west focused on supporting artists and arts leaders from underrepresented groups. Both the tourwest program and private grant awards fund over 200 grants annually and services all corners of creative west's 13-state region and three pacific jurisdictions.

Creative west provides a wide variety of services that are designed to support the development of the arts in the region. Major programs include: 1) convenings, networks, and planning processes that bring together leading practitioners in the arts field to discuss policy issues that impact artists and communities and to develop strategies for development of the arts, 2) professional development seminars for state arts agency leaders and investments in state arts agency innovation that are designed to help them become more effective and service oriented public sector agencies.

Additionally, creative west has online software as a service tools to connect artists to opportunities via; 3) the development of the public art archive, a searchable online database of completed public artworks throughout the u.s. And abroad, in which artists and managers of public art programs can contribute their work for free public viewing, and 4) arts service-based technology projects such as zapplication and call for entry (cafe tm) which support the non-profit arts community and artists in the use of technology to facilitate and advance their work.