Auburn’s newly certified Creative District was awarded a $10,000 certification grant which, according to Leslie Clark, the head of Auburn’s Chamber of Commerce, will be used for marketing and an art project that has yet to be decided on.
Establishing Auburn as a Creative District was done with the hope that a beautification and expression of culture will bring in more people as tourists and urge those visitors to see Auburn as a community they would like to settle down in. While this goal can be achieved by the heads of the Creative District simply adding things to Auburn, that is not how Clark wants to go about it. Instead, she hopes to have as much input from the community as she can get so to incorporate what the people of Auburn want to see created in their city. “Every voice is welcome,” Clark said, “not just the artistic people’s, either. Those who don’t consider themselves as ‘artistic’ still have great ideas, and they still live in Auburn. They have as much say in what is created as anyone, and we want everyone’s ideas.”
The Creative District has been meeting with community members for some time now and have created a list of Auburn’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, or more simply, the SWOT Summary. It was expressed that Auburn lacks in identity, something that sets the city apart from other communities in the area, and creating this identity has been deemed Goal #1 by the creative district. A lack of cohesive and central communication in the community was also expressed, and giving more attention to the promotion of events and other such things happing in Auburn was named as Goal #2.
