Help Us Protect Cultural Spaces in Cambridge
Help the City of Cambridge better protect cultural spaces and identify opportunities to create new ones by answering our Cultural Spaces Survey:
https://app.smartsheet.com/b/form/3baa1c4b4ca6482ea7fb081a3376eefb
If you run a theater, dance studio, nightclub, recording studio, makerspace, art studio, book store or other wonderful cultural space in Cambridge, we’d love to hear from you. Information you provide will help guide Cambridge Arts and the City of Cambridge’s Community Development Department as we strengthen planning procedures and better coordinate policies.
Our efforts to support cultural spaces are part of the $140,000 “Making Space for Art: Securing Cultural Infrastructure” regional project from the cities of Cambridge, Boston and Somerville, together with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), to equip planners and arts advocates with information that will help them enact policies to increase access to existing cultural infrastructure, reduce barriers to creating new arts spaces, and help make access to arts spaces more equitable.
Some of the City of Cambridge’s recent efforts to help make sure art spaces stay here have included:
• Renovation of the Harvard Square Kiosk to turn it into a community gathering space, opening spring 2025.
• $46 million renovation of The Foundry to convert the 1889 industrial building into a cultural hub.
• $81,000 awarded annually to Cambridge nonprofits via Cambridge Arts Organizational Investment Grants.
• Providing space and financial support for Starlight Square as a safe, outdoor event space during the worst of the covid pandemic.
• $450,000 in Create Cambridge: Arts Nonprofit Covid-19 Recovery Grants awarded to 25 nonprofits in late 2024 by the City of Cambridge (managed by Cambridge Arts and the city’s Community Development Department), in partnership with the Create Cambridge cultural nonprofit coalition, with funding from the federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).
• Shade Is Social Justice program in 2024 and 2025, which places temporary public art structures across the city to provide shade, to offer spaces for the creation and presentation of cultural programming, and to further the city’s efforts to address our warming world.
