THE COVENANT TO BUILDING PROSPERITY IN CHICO

Creativity is fundamental to being human and is a critical resource to individual, community, and economics life. Creative communities are vibrant, humanizing places, nurturing personal growth, sparkling cultural and technological breakthroughs, producing jobs, wealth, and prosperity and accepting a variety of lifestyles and culture.

Creativity resides in everyone everywhere, so building a community of ideas means empowering all people with the ability to express and use the genius of their own creativity and bring it to bear as responsible citizens.

This Covenant is our call to action for Chico.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES: 1. We cultivate and reward creativity. Everyone is part of the value chain of creativity. Creativity can happen at any time, anywhere, and it’s happening in our community of Chico right now. Let’s pay attention.

2. We invest in the creative ecosystem. The creative ecosystem can include arts and culture, nightlife, the music scene, restaurants, artists and designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, affordable spaces, lively neighborhoods, spirituality, education, density, public spaces and third places.

3. We embrace diversity. It gives birth to creativity, innovation, and positive economic impact. People of different backgrounds and experiences contribute a diversity of ideas, expressions, talents and perspectives that enrich communities.

4. We nurture the creatives, support the connectors, and collaborate to compete in a new way that gets everyone in the game.

5. We value risk-taking to convert a “no” climate into a “yes” climate. We invest in opportunity-making, not just problem-solving. We tap into the creative talent, technology, and energy for your community. We challenge conventional wisdom.

6. We strive to be authentic, to identify the value each person adds, and focus on those assets where Chico can be unique. Let’s dare to be different, not simply the look-alike of another community. We resist mono-culture and homogeneity. Every community can be the right community.

7. We invest in and build on quality of place. While inherited features such as climate, natural resources and population are important, other critical features such as arts and culture, open and green spaces, a vibrant downtown and centers of learning can be built and strengthened. We work to remove barriers to creativity, such as mediocrity, intolerance, disconnectedness, sprawl, poverty, bad schools, exclusivity and social and environmental degradation.

8. We take responsibility for change in our community. We Improvise. We make things happen. Development is a “do it yourself” enterprise.

9. We seek to ensure that every person, especially children, has the right to creativity. The highest quality of lifelong education is critical to developing and retaining creative individuals as a resource for communities.

We as people of Chico accept the responsibility to be stewards of creativity in our community. We understand the ideas and principles in this document and understand this covenant can be adjusted to reflect our unique needs and assets.