Date of Award

7-13-2014

Document Type

Open Access Honors Thesis

Subject Categories

Civic and Community Engagement | Community-Based Learning | Community-Based Research | Economic Policy | Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations | Public Economics

Abstract

During my senior year in the Honors College at UMass Boston, I became involved in the yearlong Creative and Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship program. During this program, I interned alongside other UMass Boston students at a local creative non-profit organization, providing the staff with assistance as they worked towards achieving their goals. This internship was funded by the Creative Economy Fund (CE Fund) from the University of Massachusetts President’s Office. My involvement in this program sparked an interest in pursuing an Honors thesis investigating the CE Fund and how the awarded projects are benefitted by that fund.

After looking through all of the grants awarded by the CE Fund since its inception in 2007, I decided to research four projects that focused on revitalization of post-industrial cities and towns (including Lowell, Somerville, and New Bedford) by utilizing cultural arts to stimulate the cities’ creative economies. The focus of my work is how the CE Fund allowed these projects to revitalize some aspect of these cities, and how these projects assessed outcomes and overall impacts. In essence, I asked the question: How has each project positively changed its respective city, and to what extent has the CE Fund affected the creative economics of the various regions of Massachusetts?

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