Implementation of one of the objectives of the Ohio Arts Council's new strategic plan may result in a first-of-its-kind arts-oriented community development initiative unlike any other in the country. To develop long-term economic, educational and cultural partnerships to strengthen and diversify links within rural, urban and regional communities, OAC staff have begun meeting with community leaders in Akron, Hamilton and Portsmouth. "Over the past 10 years, cultural plans developed at the community level have not been closely aligned with overall development plans for those communities," says Christy Farnbauch, Ohio Arts Council Community Arts coordinator. "They have been little more than inventories of cultural organizations. We'd like to change that by exploring the ways the arts can play a public role in strengthening community infrastructure and development." Together with representatives from Akron, Hamilton and Portsmouth, national arts consultants and the Ohio Department of Development, the OAC has begun studying local civic and arts agendas, finding areas where they overlap and can complement each other. The OAC advisory team will host town meetings in each community to build local commitment to the project. Richard Luftig, a research consultant at Miami University, developed a highly successful arts education research methodology used in the Hamilton and Fairfield city schools. He is developing a technique for collecting the necessary community development data for this project, likely to be a combination of focus groups, surveys and interviews. The goal of the initiative is that the three cities will develop their own strategic plans for meaningful public impact of the arts by the summer of 1999 and become eligible for OAC funding in the fall of that year. "We are still in a very early idea stage," Farnbauch says. "But if the initiative is successful, we will have developed an approach that can be used to establish community-level public arts policies nationwide."