by John M. Eger

December 7, 2025

Earlier this year, the City of San Diego adopted its first comprehensive cultural plan, Creative City, to guide investments in arts, culture, and creativity and the economy over the next 10 years. The plan outlines a shared vision, goals, strategies, and actions to sustain and enhance San Diego’s economic, cultural and creative ecosystems. 

While centered on San Diego, it also includes cultural policy recommendations that will benefit the larger trans-border region, ultimately positioning San Diego as a global creative and economic  hub. 

Last month Rachel Laing, an important player in the city and more recently a major figure of Mayor Gloria’s staff,  was appointed “Assistant Deputy Director in the Economic Development Department, leading the City of San Diego’s efforts to cultivate a thriving creative economy.” This is someone who makes things happen. With her background and experience, the city’s plan to becoming a “Creative City” has been dramatically energized.

Together with organizations like Vanguard Culture, positioned as “a creative and economic catalyst for the region and beyond,” it is more and more likely that San Diego is on its way to becoming an Arts Community. Vanguard Culture represents a model for what local arts leadership can be in the 21st century: nimble, inclusive, interdisciplinary, and economically strategic. 

As many of us sadly know too well, the Trump administration dismantled any semblance of Federal leadership by firing the Kennedy Center‘s Board of Trustees, dissolving the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and cancelling all of the programs once aimed at promoting diversity and inclusion. Federal funding cuts soon followed—undermining key agencies such as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and even arts programs within the Department of Education. On December 3rd, The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which distributes federal funding to libraries and museums across the U.S., has reinstated all grants previously terminated by the Trump Administration, following a federal court ruling that deemed the administration’s actions unlawful.

In the absence of meaningful federal leadership in arts and culture, the responsibility to sustain fairness, inclusion, and access now falls on cities, communities, and local organizations. San Diego is one of the few cities in America not sitting back but rather taking charge of one of its most vital missions to prepare itself for the new economy.

Communities, like San Diego, are now taking the lead, forming regional alliances and nonprofit collaborations to preserve the creative infrastructure that federal programs once supported. The arts cultivate imagination, critical thinking, and the ability to see patterns and possibilities where others see limits. These are precisely the skills needed to design bold solutions, build inclusive communities, and adapt to a rapidly changing global marketplace.

The arts are where our collective future begins. But it depends on collaboration — between artists, cultural organizations, educators, business leaders, and city governments. As such, supporting the arts is not an act of charity; it is an act of national strategy.