According to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), creative placemaking refers to integrating arts and culture into revitalization efforts to make communities more livable and vibrant as a means to enhance the quality of life. Through such efforts, communities can create a unique sense of place and spur the growth of their local economies. The Cooperative Extension Service provides programming and varied opportunities to help communities thrive, including efforts to support community and economic development. Often, the arts are an underestimated need for people and particularly in underserved communities. Fortunately, the Fine Arts Extension Program in Kentucky fills in the arts education and programming gaps with educational resources through CES and has contributed to creative placemaking endeavors for people in non-urban regions, and underserved areas and geographic locations. Ultimately, fine arts programming and participation through Extension Programming have the potential for creative placemaking benefits, which include fostering entrepreneurs and cultural industries, training the next generation of cultural workforce, among other human, social, and economic capitals.

The Department of Landscape Architecture and the Community and Economic Development Initiative of Kentucky received a $50,000 grant from the NEA for a project titled “To Support Integration of Creative Placemaking into Cooperative Extension Programming: a Knowledge Building Project.” The project is designed to enhance the Cooperative Extension Service's capacity to support community investments that strengthen livability through creative placemaking. Jayoung Koo, associate extension professor, and Melissa Bond, arts extension program leader, are leading the UK project team and partnering with the National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals (NACDEP) to expand Kentucky's extension fine arts and placemaking programming practices across the country. The final goal of the project is to develop a comprehensive Creative Placemaking toolkit based on evidence from Kentucky Fine Arts Extension programming and UK Landscape Architecture community design projects. The toolkit is intended for Cooperative Extension personnel nationwide to utilize whether through direct programming or collaborations with allied partners.

For the first phase of the project, Koo, Bond, and Simona Balazs (CEDIK’s research director) presented research findings of Fine Arts Extension’s performances from 2005 to 2019 at the NACDEP annual conference in June 2020. The research team analyzed a combined 29 years of on-the-ground extension arts programming by fine arts extension agents. We analyzed 235 program plans and 254 success stories based on the major area programming (MAP), and statistical contact information from 5 counties that had or still house Fine Arts Extension agents. The research team concluded that most program plans fall under performing arts/ performing and visual arts, followed by community and economic development, tourism and economic development. Unsurprisingly, as the number of Fine Arts Extension agents and programming titles grew over the years, the number of program plans also increased. As we aimed to understand the effect of the Fine Arts Extension programs through programming efforts of Extension Agents in Kentucky, we were able to identify successful programs that are relevant to creative placemaking and those that can be replicable in other communities nationally. The study also found that although Fine Arts Extension agents may be trained in a narrowly defined fine arts subcategory, with time, interest, effort, and collaboration, the agents have expanded and extended their areas of expertise to include creative placemaking efforts in their communities as fine arts extension educators. Furthermore, as a collective, the UK Fine Arts Extension team has grown in size and expanded their knowledge of arts programming delivery and expertise, and expanded their areas of education for community members while increasing the human, social, and economic capital for creative placemaking in communities.