Our Clients
Durham Cultural Roadmap
The City of Durham and Durham County engaged MJR Partners to lead Phases II and III of the Durham Cultural Roadmap, driving the community's first comprehensive cultural plan in two decades, and the framework that will guide public arts programming, funding, and policy going forward. To put residents' voices at the center of the plan, MJR Partners designed and ran a countywide engagement process: a familiarization tour of Durham's formal and informal cultural spaces, listening sessions and public discovery events, in-depth interviews and focus groups with artists and culture bearers, and mobile micro-surveys. Alongside the engagement work, we conducted a full equity audit of Durham's cultural grantmaking and built a longitudinal study benchmarking Durham against fifteen peer cities from 1990 to 2024. Final deliverables include the Cultural Roadmap itself, recommended governance and staffing structures for a city/county arts agency, a redesigned approach to grantmaking, partnership models for new art-making spaces, a comparative data dashboard for elected officials, and implementation strategies with benchmarks for measuring progress after adoption.
City of Austin CULTURAL FUNDING REVIEW
The City of Austin engaged MJR Partners to review the grant programs administered by its Cultural Arts Division. The scope expanded twice during the engagement, first to take in the Music Division and Historic Preservation Division grants, then the city's Public Art Programs. MJR Partners examined Austin's cultural funding system end to end: eligibility criteria, application language, panel structures, and the decision-making practices that determined who received public dollars and who did not. Community voice drove the findings. The final report captured what Austin's artists and cultural organizations said they needed and laid out concrete steps to re-imagine the city's cultural funding — published in English and Spanish (El camino hacia la equidad cultural) so the recommendations were accessible to the communities they were written for. The review was completed in May 2022 and accepted and approved by Austin City Council the following month.
Imagine Desoto
The City of DeSoto engaged MJR Partners to launch its first cultural planning process. MJR Partners led community engagement and artist development work sessions across the city, then translated that input into the infrastructure a young arts program actually needs to function: new funding programs, professional development workshops for commission members and local artists, and formal protocols for grant panels and public art review panels. The engagement produced DeSoto's first public art commission and Imagine DeSoto, a community cultural plan adopted by the DeSoto City Council in August 2021.
AMPLIFY COLUMBIA
Commissioned as part of the City of Columbia's Comprehensive Plan, Amplify Columbia set the strategic direction for arts and culture across the city. MJR Partners designed and led the community engagement process, surfaced the priorities of Columbia's artists, cultural organizations, and residents, and proposed the implementation steps required to act on them. The team also built a public-facing platform (amplifycolumbia.com) to keep the community informed during the process and after it. Amplify Columbia was approved and adopted by Columbia City Council in March 2020.
WFAAC PERFORMING ARTS FACILITY FEASIBILITY STUDY
The Wichita Falls Alliance for Arts and Culture engaged MJR Partners to determine whether the region was ready for a performing arts facility — a question that demanded an honest answer rather than a hopeful one. MJR Partners assessed community demand, organizational capacity, and the funding and operating conditions such a facility would require to survive past its opening season, delivering a study and executive summary that gave the Alliance and its stakeholders a clear-eyed basis for their next decision. The study was approved and accepted in December 2023.
IRving ARTS AND CULTURAL NEEDS ASSESSMENT
The City of Irving commissioned MJR Partners to assess the city's arts and cultural resources, funded by Hotel Occupancy Tax revenue. The work examined the operations and status of resident organizations funded by the Irving Arts Board, measured citywide participation in arts and cultural activities, and evaluated whether Irving's cultural organizations had the capacity to serve a rapidly changing population, with extensive community engagement and resident input built into the process. The recommendations carried directly into Irving's 2016 Comprehensive Plan, which set a citywide goal of using arts and cultural resources to unite Irving as one cohesive city of vibrant, diverse neighborhoods, and named implementation of the needs assessment as the strategy for getting there
