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Creative Economy Facts

The creative economy includes work that results in cultural products or services…from glassblowing to web designing and from working as a security guard in a museum to being an accountant in a graphic design firm.

Three overlapping aggregates measure New England’s creative economy in terms of people, organizations or businesses, and places:

The Creative Workforce
The creative workforce is composed of individuals whose jobs require skill in the cultural, fine, or applied arts. This group of individual workers may be employed within the creative cluster (a curator at a museum), in an industry outside the creative cluster (a web designer at an investment firm), or they may be self-employed (an interior designer).

The Creative Cluster
This term refers to a group of nonprofit organizations and businesses (sole proprietorships, partnerships or corporations) that produce goods and services based in cultural enterprise, the fine or applied arts.   The workforce for creative cluster industries, such as museums and architectural firms, includes creative workers with skills in the cultural, fine, or applied arts, such as self-employed craftspeople, and workers with skills in other areas, such as museum guards.

Creative Communities
This term refers to geographic locations within New England where quality of life is directly connected to higher concentrations of creative workers and creative cluster industries. Creative communities understand and value their cultural assets. They support diversity and innovation.

New Hampshire Statistics

53% of NH’s creative workers are employed in for-profit businesses; 7%, in nonprofits; 14%, in government; and 26% are self-employed.

About 16,000 creative workers, in 34 job categories, make up 2.5% of NH’s labor force.

The economic impact of New Hampshire’s nonprofit cultural organizations, a subset of the state’s creative cluster employing 4300 workers, is $136.4 million.

For more information on the creative economy, visit www.nefa.org or www.creative-economy.org