Creative economies prosper when they think creatively about themselves. In Portland, you can see that in action in the “Springboard” sessions run by Common Good Ventures.

Every month or so, Springboard pulls together local business leaders to think as out-of-the-box as possible about a nonprofit organization’s problem. In just 90 fast-paced minutes, some of Portland’s most resourceful businesspeople cluster around a table and help the organization develop ideas about a better business plan, more savvy marketing or, really, any business issue.

It all happens at the offices of the VIA Agency, in the historic Baxter Library building, which they have completely retooled for their own look and style. Around the table are local representatives from the worlds of marketing, law, finance, media, retail, and more. Up steps the nonprofit’s Executive Director and he/she walks the group through the organization’s background and particular issue.

What follows is a zippity-quick process of tossing out ideas that are posted on the wall, with time for explanations. In a structured format, the conversation goes back and forth boisterously and convivially. At the end of an hour-and-a-half, the nonprofit comes away with a raft of implementable ideas and perspectives. The for-profit attendees come away knowing that they have had direct—and quick—input into a local organization’s core concerns.

For example, a Springboard session this morning focused on Community Television Network, Portland’s cable access channel. CTN wanted ideas on how to boost sales of their video production services, which in turn support their nonprofit programming. By the end of 90 minutes, the wall was covered with colored stickies categorized into topics like Outreach, Cool Quotient, Social Media, Re-Branding, and Local Products.

Will Springboard replace McKinsey’s management consulting teams? Unlikely. But the process does provide a way for Portland’s nonprofit and for-profit communities to interact in a cooperative, non-threatening, results-driven atmosphere. Plus, it’s free for the nonprofit—and fun for the participants!

You can contact Chad Sclove if you want to attend the next Springboard.

Photo by John Spritz

Part of what makes Portland’s First Friday Art Walks so much fun is that they have no epicenter. As the crowd surges along Congress Street, with smaller group investigating eddies in the Old Port, the Place To Be shifts from one locale to the next. One sure thing: if you stroll enough, and walk through enough doors, wonderful things will happen.

Last night, the December Art Walk that leads up to the holidays, there was an extra energy in the air. You could sense it at Congress Square: on one side, the line snaked into the State Theater for The Fogcutters present Big Band Syndrome (Lauren Wayne posted a video of the finale of the show); the other side of the square featured the Portland Museum of Art (free on Friday nights) and their hypnotic show on classic Shaker artifacts. Meanwhile, in-between, Art Walkers trundled up the stairs of the Flat Iron Gallery, in the pie-slice-shaped Hay Building, to sip and chew and ruminate on Art, Life, and Living in Portland.

Another wonderful thing, as always, took place at Otto Pizza, a few steps down Congress Street. Your correspondent was among the many who stood happily on the sidewalk, waiting in line to purchase a slice of what many consider to be the finest pizza north of Boston (and now Otto is in Harvard Square, too!). When it comes in as ideal and manifold a presentation as Otto offers, pizza can crystallize the creative economy.

Outside Otto, the sidewalk mambo was wending its way down Congress Street to Space Gallery, with many a stop along the way. Inside Space, one of First Friday’s mainstays, there was music, there was art, there was laughter, there was drinking, there were jostling crowds and a buoyant sense of pleasure in the air. There was also an Alternative Gift Market where you could buy donations to a wide range of curated non-profits and deliver them in a selection of limited edition, hand printed cards designed by artists Beth Taylor, Erin Flett and Jacqueline Dubois.

If you prefer your art au plein air, you could step outside of Space onto the sidewalk, where an open-air truck had pulled up to the curb. Just climb the ramp into the truck’s back to observe the paintings hanging within.

The crowd kept surging, now on to the Maine College of Art. Every year, MECA combines their First Friday participation with a huge holiday sale of items by college students and alums. This year, three floors were given over to a cavalcade of holidazzles, and so the crowds were especially strong here. Among the (hundreds of?) tables and booths, there seemed to be a particular emphasis on recycled treasures: playing cards converted into wallets, umbrellas converted into aprons, stamps converted into earrings.

For those who needed to retreat from the gleeful cacophony of MECA, there was quieter contemplation at galleries where one could, for instance, admire scale models, photos, and blueprints celebrating the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Or, upstairs at Cross Jewelers, you could sample “tastings” of various hot cocoas. Then back out into the street and more galleries, more stores, more music.

Until, in the words of Samuel Pepys, one has turned First Friday into First Saturday, “and so to bed.”

Photos by John Spritz

In a world of uncertainty, why celebrate risk? Why put everything you have into a crazy idea with only the barest beginnings of a plan? Ask that to Corey, Tyler and Seth, above, when they leave Love, The Bus in LA and fly back to Camden to be among the keynote speakers at the Juice 3.0 Conference in Camden on November 4 and 5th. In the case of Tyler Dunham, Seth Brown, and Corey McLean, these three “lifelong friends, filmmakers, and adventurers from the coastal town of Lincolnville, Maine (pop. 2,042). …[are] brimming with optimistic energy and a desire to accomplish something epic.” So they converted an old schoolbus into a grease-powered, web video road trip mobile and have been travelling around the country raising money to fund projects for community organizations and uploading the results in real time. If they can do all that, what else can they do?

And that’s just the point. The creative economy, the innovation economy, the experience economy—these are all expressions of the fluidity required by this crazy world—call it the improvisation economy. The Juice Conference is dedicated to bringing together a wide range of creative, innovative thinkers who have figured out how to put their ideas into action. Speakers and panelists include Maine heavyweights like Governor Angus King, Eliot Cutler and Roxanne Quimby, art world luminaries like Louisa McCall, Donna McNeil, and Eric Fischl and technological innovators like Kerem Durdag, John Ferland and  Steve Page. Portland’s creative economy is well represented by Ben Sawyer, of Digital Mill, Josh Broder of Tilson Technologies, Paul Dobbins, of Ocean Approved, Stephanie Volo of Planet Dog and Jaime Parker of Portland Trails.

One of the highlights of the conference is the pitch contest with $150,000 in financing to the winning business plans. (The deadline has been extended to Friday, October 28, so there’s still time to apply). If you’re not up for facing the “shark tank” in the pitch contest, they also have a short film contest (the deadline to apply is also now this friday.) Putting business plans and people who think about making business plans in front of investors and experts about those businesses is exactly what Juice is trying to do. And if your plan sounds like a mystery bus ride, what start up these days doesn’t?

Maine is full of smart people doing interesting things, but we may all be a bit too independently minded for our own good. That’s why conferences like Juice (and TEDx Dirigo) and places like Portland are so important. As the innovation economy spreads out through Maine, Portland has a role to play as a place to bring people together, to develop stories, to share a great meals, to cross-pollenate and propagate. Josh Broder of Portland’s Tilson Technology was just named to MaineBiz’s Next List for 2011. In the article he predicts that certain parts of the economy are poised for significant growth, “especially in those industries with strong ties to the creative economy. ‘American centers of innovation are our capital—the companies coming from technology, software and social media,’ he says. ‘All of those new things require significant infrastructure, and we’re the infrastructure provider.’”

And the same could be said of Portland. If risk is the juice of the Maine’s creative economy, Portland is it’s glass.

Photo from Love, The Bus

The First Friday Art Walk has entered a new phase in its life cycle as the flagship of Portland’s creative economy. Since July, designer Jennifer S. Muller has been producing a beautiful broadside map and program distributed the previous Thursday in The Portland Press Herald. The way the heavy, uncoated stock of the piece absorbs the ink makes it look more hand made than commercially printed, which is just the right touch for the Art Walk that aims to stoke local commerce through the propagation of fine art.

And building on the uproarious success of the What Cheer? Brigade at the SPACE Gallery Block Party, tonight’s festivities include New York’s Asphalt Orchestra for more street band fun. (Thank you, Portland Ovations) Programs? Marching Bands? And soon food carts? This is beginning to sound like a sporting event for creatives!

Some of tonights highlights include: a performance at 4:30 in Congress Square by The Milkman’s Union presented by the Portland Music Foundation to highlight this year’s Portland entries in the NYC’s CMJ Music Marathon; the opening reception of Good Design is Good Business: The Elements of Branding, the 2011 AIGA Maine Annual Exhibit at the Lewis Gallery, Portland Public Library, 5 Monument Square; an exhibit of photographs from the Portland Ballet’s “Who’s Your Dancer” project will be  on view at the KeyBank Monument Square branch; and the work of at least one Portland mayoral candidate is on view!

John Rooks is a true Portland original. As the founder and president of The Soap Group, he is at the forefront of business consulting for sustainability and social justice. In his new book, More Than Promote, he looks past the duality of consumerism and environmentalism and “reassembles a new thing; a strategy and methodology of promotion that is, simultaneously, sustainability.” Neat trick, John.

For his presentation at TEDxDirigo, Rooks tackled the issue of authenticity (often hilariously) and it’s post modern sci-fi doppelganger, the simulacrum. For those of you less up on your Philip K. Dick (and Arnold Schwarzenegger) than John, a simulacrum is a copy for which there is no original. His point is that advertisers have to move beyond the wink-wink head fake of “green” marketing to the more radical transparency of authenticity.

I was intrigued by John’s concept of the “authenticity audit” and about how it might apply to Portland. In many ways, the appeal of Portland—and of Maine—is that they are originals for which there is no copy, so I though we would hold up pretty well. I asked him to sketch out for us what an audit of Portland might look like and, true to form, what he came up with was both tougher and more helpful than I had anticipated:

When a cruise ship pulls into Portland, and the tourists spill out into the street, money falling from their pockets as they shuffle their way into chowder houses, are they experiencing the real Portland?

Do we, as residents experience the real Portland?  Is there any such thing as a Real Portland? It’s not a metaphysical question.  It’s a strategic question important to mental and economic health of our city.

Today, the question is important because Authenticity is a new kind of currency.  Brands and destinations are all claiming that they offer authentic products and experiences.  Realwashing is the new greenwashing.  So, as both a brand and a destination it seems that Portland might want to explore its own Authenticity a bit.  The underlying logic says that consumers (or in our case residents) want more Authenticity in their lives.  And brands (or cities) need to be ready to deliver.

But contrary to popular mythologies, Authenticity is not an effortless way of being.  It does not just happen.  People, businesses and even municipalities need to work hard at it. This is where things get exciting.  It turns out that Authentic people are happier.  And Authentic businesses are more profitable.  Authentic cities, the logic follows, would have happier people and more profitable businesses inside the city limits.

If we were to perform an Authenticity Audit on Portland, what would we find?  If we measured what Portland says about itself (via Portland Downtown District, LiveWorkPortland, PACA, Greater Portland Convention and Visitors Bureau, Portland Buy Local, the Chamber, City Hall, Maine Department of Tourism, etc., etc) against what Portland actually does, what do you think we would we find?  That’s the authenticity formula – the difference between what you say and what you do.  And between the two is an Authenticity Gap™.  Within the Authenticity Gap are opportunities to make yourself, your business and your Portland a better place.

What Rooks is pointing to, from our local perspective, is that the conditions that have created the creative economy in Portland need to be explored, understood and promoted. And beyond that, the sustainability of the creative economy here is based on the authentic talents and efforts of people and companies that are responding to the authentic needs of their customers and the challenging conditions of our times. And that response is an ongoing human performance, not a robot on auto pilot. It’s not easy being authentic, but it wasn’t easy for Kermit to be green, either.

Image of John Rooks courtesy of TEDxDirigo, photograph by Jason Esposito

It’s an old story—repeated from SoHo in New York in the 70s to SoMa in San Francisco in the 90s—the artists move in, the rents go up, the artists move on. But in the last 40 years, cities have learned that there are alternatives to this shell game that gentrifies the avant-garde. Live/work development has been used successfully in many cites as a way of enabling working artists to stay in the neighborhoods that they have helped to revitalize.

“Developing spaces that keep artists and creative people living and working in our downtown is essential to maintaining our city’s appealing character,” says Jennifer Hutchins, executive director of the Creative Portland Corporation and the Portland Arts and Cultural Alliance (PACA). “We know that a vibrant arts scene attracts commercial activity and helps keep our local economy strong.” To this end, Creative Portland has invited representatives from Artspace—a nonprofit based in Minneapolis, Minn. that specializes in the development of artist live/work spaces—for a two-day visit next week to help assess the conditions for such development in Portland. Artspace will meet with everyone from real estate developers, philanthropists and city officials, to community members, artists and cultural institutions to determine the needs and interest in this type of project, and to help frame the issues that would need to be resolved among these parties.

While in Portland, Artspace will also visit three potential development sites: the Portland Public Works garage at 55 Portland Street; the Masonic Temple at 8 Chestnut Street; and a block of properties at the corners of Hampshire Street and Federal Street in the India Street neighborhood. It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see what turning one of these underutilized buildings into a live/work development could do both for local artists and for artists looking to relocate here from elsewhere.

A highlight of the Artspace visit will be a free public presentation, on Thursday, September 29, at 6:00 p.m. in the Rines Auditorium of the Portland Public Library. After a 30-45 minute interactive presentation about Artspace’s model for developing artist live/work space and examples of their projects throughout the country, the audience will be invited ask questions, provide feedback and contribute their views on community needs and interest in a live/work project in Portland.

Artspace has a national overview on creating affordable space for the artists and arts organizations, and they’ve been doing it for more than 30 years. Andy Graham, President of Creative Portland, says “I’m happy to have Artspace visit Portland because it gives us an opportunity to talk about what is missing in Portland, to imagine together what Portland needs to be even better.”

Photograph of blueprint mural on Free Street by Corey Tempelton, Portland, Maine

For the intrepid Portlander (including your devoted editor) next Saturday promises to be even more immersive than usual. From 9 to 5 I will punch in at the Portland Stage Company on Forest Ave. and have my head filled with “Maine Ideas Worth Spreading” at the second annual TEDxDirigo conference. Then, at quittin’ time, the more than 200 conference attendees and speakers will pour out onto the street and find themselves just half a block from the second coming of the creative Portland carnivale that is SPACE Gallery’s Block Party. For the next three hours, the Portland Arts District will be filled with creative manifestations of all kinds. Think FirstFRIDAYxSteroidos!

And interesting for us that this is the second year that LiveWork Portland has been around to cover these events. TEDx Dirigo wasn’t on our map (literally) last year because it happened in Brunswick, at the Frontier Café near Bowdoin College. This year they hope to triple the attendance by hosting it in Portland. We were particularly enamored by the steamroller stunt at last year’s block party, and while no steamrollers are on the menu for this year’s event, there is a much longer list of individual artists and groups staging installations and performances than last year. And although they only come from Providence instead of Brazil, this year’s party band, the What Cheer? Brigade, is a 19 piece sometimes marching brass band that “mixes the sounds of Bollywood, The Balkans, New Orleans, Samba and Hip-Hop, with the intensity of a punk rock band.” Wow!

When I think about it I imagine a day of extreme cultural and intellectual density. The kind of experience you expect to find only in big cities. But these things are possible in Portland because of an unusual balance of factors—call it “small density”—that puts lots of smart people in proximity to each other without crushing overhead or soul-destroying commutes. And all that extra time and energy fuels a community of non-profits robust enough to stage ambitious events like these—sometimes two or more in a day. Portland is itself a “Maine idea worth spreading.” Pass it on!

While the national—and global—economic picture is decidedly mixed, there are signs that Portland, Maine, may be exceptional in more ways than it’s number of James Beard nominations per capita. This may be highly anecdotal, but in the last few weeks many postings for high-level creative jobs in Portland have moved across my radar. These are not just-out-of-college quasi-paid internships, but well-paying jobs worth moving from Brooklyn, Boston, Berkeley or Austin for. Putney, a veterinary products startup based in Portland, was the highest ranking Maine company on Inc. magazine’s list of the 5,000 fastest growng small companies with an impressive 291% three year growth rate. Go to the careers page their website and you’ll see they are looking for a director of marketing; If you follow Mediabistro you would have seen a posting for an art director at Kemp Goldberg Partners marketing and advertising agency; and (as I mentioned in a recent post) The Via Agency has 8 positions to be filled.

At a time when all levels of government are talking about how to spur job creation it is great to see that the creative economy (at least here in Portland) is actually doing it. All kinds of non-profits are sharpening their business focus as well in hopes of remaining relevant and positioning themselves as worthy targets for scarce investment dollars. The speakers at the upcoming TEDxDirigo conference receive coaching in how to distill their “ideas worth spreading” into 18 minutes or less and then get a high quality video of their talk to help them spread those ideas further. MaineBiz just did a profile on founder Adam Burk. TEDxDirigo talks are not quite elevator pitches, but they’re a way to give creative social entrepreneurs a leg up on getting attention—and funding.

Art, it must be said, is not business. But there is a lot of business that develops around art. In order for that process to happen there need to be opportunities for artists to find support for their own basic research and let others jump in to find applications. The Maine Arts Commission just released a report on the economic impact of Museum attendance in Maine as a way of demonstrating an aspect of that link. MAC has shown unwavering support for both local arts organizations and individual artists, both crucial components in the growth of the creative economy from which many of the cultural perks of Portland flow.

In a similar vein, Maine AIGA’s annual exhibit this year is entitled, “Good Design is Good Business,” and the focus is on “the elements of branding.” Maine AIGA president, and partner at Portland branding shop Might & Main (formerly Forge), Sean Wilkinson says, ”Well designed presence in the world is what sets one great idea apart from another. It is ‘intelligence made visible.’ Your expertise as a business is only as valuable as people perceive it to be, and hiring a designer is one of the most important steps in shaping that perception. It also keeps good folks like me gainfully employed.”

Good folks, gainfully employed in Portland, Maine—the image of a glass filling…

background photo by Corey Templeton, Portland Daily Photo

On Monday afternoon, El-Fadel Arbab sorts through vivid, homemade signs like those pictured above, painted with slogans (“Humanity before Politics,” or “Be the Voice for Those Who Cannot Be Heard”) which he will take to this Saturday’s Peace in Sudan Rally in Washington, D.C. Schoolchildren from Portland, Maine, and our surrounding communities crafted the posters after hearing Arbab’s story.

“If you’re looking for people to help you and they don’t know anything about you, how can they help you?” Arbab asks. Since arriving in Portland from Darfur in 2004, Arbab has dedicated himself to telling the story of his childhood and his people – how the Sudanese military and Janjaweed mercenaries came when he was 12 years old and burned down his village in Darfur, a western region of Sudan, killing most of its inhabitants and separating him from family and community. He made his way to Egypt after four years, where he reunited with his mother, some of his siblings, and members of his extended family before they earned visas to come to the U.S.

Arbab’s story is remarkable, but perhaps just as surprising is how many people with stories like his live in Portland. Our metropolitan area is home to one of the largest organized Darfuri refugee populations in the United States. The Fur Cultural Revival, a non-profit organization headquartered at the Meg Perry Center in Portland, works to spread awareness about the Darfur genocide in the U.S. and ease the transition process for Darfuri refugees in the area. Through FCR, Arbab has organized a rally on the 23 of each month at Monument Square in remembrance of July 23, 2004, when the U.S. Congress declared genocide in Darfur. He sees it as another way of raising awareness.

Arbab is almost halfway toward his goal of telling his story in all 50 states.

“For the rest of my life, I will be sharing this story. I have been enslaved by the government of Sudan, burned alive, lost so many members of my family,” he says. “My story is one example, and it’s not just about Sudan. It’s about breaking the cycle of genocide.”

His preferred audience is students. “The distance between the United States and Sudan that leaders feel doesn’t exist for students. They see the human side of the conflict,” explains Arbab. “Kids want to learn and change the world.” Currently, schools across the country must sign up on a waiting list, booking Arbab a year in advance.

This Friday, FCR will bus Portlanders down to D.C. for the rally, organized by the Enough Project, Save Darfur Coalition/ Genocide Intervention Network, the FCR, and more. Arbab will speak alongside other internationally recognized human rights advocates at the event. Before the rally, Darfuris against genocide are holding a global hunger strike, which will begin at noon on Friday and end at noon on Saturday.

While Arbab’s work increasingly takes him to new parts of the country, he remains dedicated to building relationships among native and new Mainers. “When I go to a different state, Maine is on my mind – the streets, restaurants, stores, views,” Arbab says. “When I come back to Portland and see the view of the ocean, I feel so relaxed, like I am home again.”

Pictured above: Arbab with signs made by Portland’s youth.

SPACE Gallery—or just “SPACE”—is a mainstay of the First Friday Art Walk circuit here in Portland, Maine. This downtown nonprofit arts organization also functions as a hub for the city’s most mind-blowing concerts. Shows this year included Dan Deacon, Titus Andronicus, and my favorite, The What Cheer! Brigade, a 19-piece marching band that played Balkanesque beats while snaking impishly through a dance-crazy audience. Throw in events like the four-day screening of Matthew Barney’s epic The Cremaster Cycle, pornstar Annie Sprinkle’s disquisition on “eco-sexuality,” and a live storytelling series called SLANT, and you’ve begun to taste the SPACE mission: to provide a venue for what is contemporary, emerging, and unconventional.

A room that frequently approaches critical mass with sweaty dance parties certainly limits its full potential as a gallery. Installations in the ilk of Dale Chihuly would not be safe near a mosh pit! For many of us, that tension between art and livability gives SPACE its special flavor. Executive Director Nay May describes it as both the gallery’s “greatest strength” and the “biggest challenge” he’s had to navigate over the years. On July 1, and for the first time since opening in 2002, SPACE will move beyond the one room operation. They’ve usurped an adjacent property in order to have more—ahem—space. 50% more on the floor, 75% more on the wall, to be exact.

“SPACE Gallery annex” will form a dynamic duo with the main room and will moonlight as an all-purpose performance venue. In the words of May, “The dire need in this case was for us to allow some projects more room. This separate space will give us a chance to do some projects, installations, etc. that don’t coexist with other things the way we need most things to coexist in our current space.” The first annex exhibit (I was instructed to use lowercase “a”) will run from July 1 to August 5. It’s a drawing show of New York-based artists who work in various media and explore the shapes, textures, and lines of memory. For more information on “Elia Bettaglio, Selena Kimball and Tatiana Simonova: Drawings” click here.

The extra breathing room also means SPACE will be more amenable to working with local businesses and organizations. They’ve occasionally rented out the main floor for fundraising events and the like. The annex will offer Portland more opportunities to bring communities together within the walls of our creative imagination.

So thank you, SPACE, for giving us more of you! We’re looking forward to what happens next.

Above photos on left: Elia Bettaglio’s drawing “Magnifying Glass”. On right, Tatiana Simonova’s drawing “Eventuality 1.” Both artists will be featured along with Elia Bettaglio in the annex’s opening exhibit.