Northeast Lincoln’s University Place Creative District (UPCD) received an impactful $97,000 economic development grant through the Nebraska Arts Council (NAC) this spring. The state grant program exists to revitalize Nebraska neighborhoods through cultural programs geared to attract visitors and retain young people, said Bailey Barnard, a UPCD board member and Nebraska Wesleyan art history professor.
Barnard said the strengths that drew this support to University Place happen to be the same ones that had attracted her to Nebraska Wesleyan University four years earlier. She recalled her job interview with Professor of Art Lisa Lockman.
“What impressed me about Lisa in our conversations was her involvement beyond campus—her service work in University Place,” Barnard said. “That helped show me this was where I wanted to be.”
Lockman’s community involvement proved to Barnard that Nebraska Wesleyan wasn’t walled off from its neighborhood—that the people here recognized the shared stakes between campus and community. They also appreciated the role the arts could play in benefiting both groups.
Art and artists don’t merely make communities prettier, Barnard said. “They make communities stronger—economically, socially and culturally.”
When Barnard joined NWU’s faculty in 2022, she also joined a collaborative effort to secure University Place’s designation as a Nebraska Arts Council Creative District. In 2023, they succeeded. Uni Place became the first Lincoln neighborhood to receive that designation. Barnard joined UPCD’s board of directors and helped it secure this grant.
Part of the grant funds a new creative district coordinator position, Barnard said, which will help sustain UPCD’s otherwise volunteer-driven efforts. Filling that coordinator position is a new NWU graduate: Rebecca Ford (’26). The communication studies alumna began working for UPCD last year as part of her senior internship.
“I’ve been privileged to serve as the [district’s] first intern, working in marketing and web development to build our online presence, advertise events, and promote the district’s mission,” she told the Communication Studies Department blog.
“She’s been absolutely killing it,” Barnard confirmed.
Barnard called the creative district’s story another example of the ongoing symbiosis between NWU and Uni Place, where both groups win by working together.
We collaborated to create UPCD, she said. That group went on to secure funds that created a job. That job was filled by a new NWU graduate, who can now launch her career in the same neighborhood where she got her education. That work will help support the neighborhood’s artists and performers, many of whom will surely be NWU students, faculty and alumni.
The benefits of these collaborations reverberate back and forth, Barnard said, in ways that help sustain the university and the neighborhood.
“That’s how the arts work,” she said.