News & Events

RTS, in collaboration with the Public Art Collaborative Art-Force Program, is a finalist for a grant from ArtPlace to integrate artists, communities and local manufacturers in three North Carolina counties. Our team’s proposal is the only finalist from North Carolina. A full list of the finalists is available here. Below is a short description of the ArtPlace program.

One hundred and twenty-seven organizations in 68 cities have been named finalists for support from ArtPlace, an unprecedented private-public collaboration of nine of the nation’s top foundations, eight federal agencies including the National Endowment for the Arts, and six of the nation’s largest banks. ArtPlace supports creative placemaking with grants and loans, research and advocacy.

The selected projects represent the best of the more than 2,000 applications from across the country. Finalists were chosen for their potential to have a transformative impact on community vibrancy. Proposed projects run the gamut from temporary art spaces to permanent performance venues, from music festivals to art walks and from streetscaping to artist residencies.

We recently completed a project for the Kentucky Science & Technology Corporation that updated our work from 1999 that led to Kentucky’s first science, innovation and technology plan. Not much has changed in technology since 1999 except maybe Facebook, Twitter, phones that are computers, GPSs and video cameras, nano-textiles, artificial livers and hearts, the iPod, hybrid cars, YouTube, drones, personal genome maps, 3-d printers and much better golf clubs. Read the rest of this entry »

The first is our recently released report for the Appalachian Regional Commission assessing the workforce trends and needs of the ARC region’s increasingly important renewable and non-renewable energy clusters. The report, Energy Workforce Trends and Training Needs in Appalachia, also includes compelling case studies of exemplary training programs in all 13 ARC states meeting the needs of the industry.

The second is Growth from the Ground Up: Community Colleges and Sustainable Food Systems, a conference report from the Alliance for Sustainability, a creation of RTS to network community colleges, held in September 2011 in Pittsboro, NC.

Lastly, we’ve added a report from TA3, an international network of community and technical colleges, that details the information and best practices found during a study tour of Denmark that demonstrated their commitment to sustainability and green building and the technical training supporting it. The full report is available here.

For those of you unable to make the February 21 webinar on green building and sustainability in Denmark, beginning with a visit to EUC-Syd, a technical vocational school in Denmark, you can still view and hear the material at this link.

Below are some photos from the TA3 report on the study tour of Denmark that demonstrated their commitment to sustainability and the technical training supporting it. The full report is available here. Read the rest of this entry »

The Daily Yonder is a wonderful resource for keeping up with the issues, challenges and opportunities facing rural America. We are pleased to have Bill Bishop, who is the main force behind the Daily Yonder, as a board member here at RTS.

Our founder Stuart Rosenfeld has been working with the state of Mississippi over the last couple of years both looking at their creative economy as an economic and cultural engine but also at designing programs and policies to build a stronger creative economy within the state. Stu’s new article in the Daily Yonder gives a great overview of the creative economy in Mississippi and how it weaves into the state’s economy. A must-read for those interested in the creative economy.

A juke joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It’s part of the annual Juke Joint Festival.

The America COMPETES project of the US Commerce Department focuses on how we can out innovate, out educate, out connect, out produce and out empower the rest of the global economy. The project is a two year effort with an impressive advisory board. It culminated in the final report “The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States” delivered today to Congress. You can download the full report or go to the main website to see videos or investigate the various elements of the effort.

The Investment & Innovation Forum is a Canberra, Australia-based organization created by Rod Brown of the Cockatoo network. More info on them is available here.

With members in 33 countries, the focus is on best practices in innovative economic development. The latest issue of their Cockatoo newsletter highlights our recently released work for the State of Mississippi on its creative economy. There is a link to the CraftNET Sketches here.

You can subscribe to the Cockatoo Newsletter by email at apdcockatoo@iprimus.com.au.

We just released the October 2011 issue of CraftNet Sketches.

In this issue
Community College News: Kentucky School of Crafts at Hazard Community & Technical College, Haywood Community College, Montana Arts Council, Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College, Western Piedmont Community College
Research, Events, and News: Mississippi Creative Economy Summit, South Arts Reports, Creative Economy Assets in Rural Communities, Culinary Improvisation, the Science of Guitar Building, EU Capitals of Culture Evaluation
CraftNet Member Profile: Western Piedmont Community College

About CraftNet:
CraftNet is an international alliance of community colleges in North America, Europe, and Africa that work together to enhance their own arts and crafts-based teaching programs and to develop local and regional artisan-based economies. It was conceived and is managed by Regional Technology Strategies.

Parliament is an interesting collection of, as they call themselves, “Working Class Creatives” helping to build a stronger and more interesting creative milieu in the Charleston, SC metro area. They certainly seem to sponsor some really interesting events! To keep up check out their blog.

And we say all this not just because they partially funded and devote a page to the work we did on the creative economy in Charleston.

The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce just released a report on the role of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) in the future workforce. They find that STEM jobs will be the second fastest growing occupational category after health care. The reports, state-level data and a webinar are available at their website.

While the report focuses mostly on the 4-year and graduate degrees our research and discussions with companies also finds that STEM skills are increasingly needed for those in manufacturing production occupations that do not require a 4-year degree. Manufacturers consistently describe the need for STEM backgrounds in the increasingly high-tech environment of modern manufacturing, whether in reading blueprints, working in production teams or solving problems within the production process.

A proposed policy response is to push the STEM focus further down into the k-12 system with geometry and algebra introduced in general middle school classes.