Editor's Note: Ann Graham is a board member for several arts and nonprofit organizations like Theatre Action Project and Liveable City. She is a member of the Leadership Team of CreateAustin and a participant of Imagine Austin. She is a freelance producer of community-building events and a tireless promoter for the arts in all forms of civic engagement. This essay is a part of the Imagine Austin's Future series.

How do we make Austin into the ideal community? Apart from the things we can’t seem to change, like summer temperatures and the Texas legislature, how can we take our collective resources and build on the good things (and work to carve away at the less-so) to make Austin the best place it can be?

Austin is known as a creative locus, a hub for inventive theater, live music, technological innovation, culinary arts, sustainable design, intellectual achievement, literary richness, educational opportunities and cultural richness.

But our biggest ongoing challenges and opportunities, in my opinion, lie in how we foster these arenas for continual growth while weaving them together with that which we forget are cultural interfaces. These arenas, however, are vital to a healthy community: affordability (housing, utilities healthcare), a network of public transportation, sustainable use of natural resources, strong and equitable public education and childcare and a network of accessible parkland.

CreateAustin – the City of Austin’s formal cultural planning process undertaken between 2006 and 2010 — began building this network by fostering dialogue over half a decade. Together, we formulated 60 recommendations that comprehensively defined the breadth of artists’ needs and allow the creative community to flourish here in Austin in the coming 10 years.

Not surprisingly, CreateAustin discovered that we all share the same basic needs of affordable housing, transportation, healthcare, education, etc. But we also elucidated the host of needs that are unique to creative output: access to materials, spaces for production, creation and sharing of new media.

CreateAustin is a working document that is already being acted upon by a host of individuals and organizations, along with the City of Austin, and one that we need to continually reference and update over time.

It is also a conversation that needs to be proactively brought to new audiences. The general public, the business community, and the larger political arena can promote and show the economic and cultural impact of the arts and creativity and how we will all suffer as a community if we don’t find the resources to allow it to prosper.

ImagineAustin – the City of Austin’s 30 year master planning process — is the next step. This is where the voice of CreateAustin is heard, through diligence, persistence, and education from key players in the process.

ImagineAustin, like CreateAustin, will only be as good as its goals, the infrastructure provided through public leadership and private partnership, and its ultimate implementation through timely and effective allocation of resources.

What is exciting, today, as we think ahead to making Austin a better place, are the breadth of examples — both large and small scale — already at work. Luckily, while this growth takes tremendous energy and resources (and needs even more!), engaged Austinites are not waiting for it to happen.

For example, Ballet Austin’s Light/The Holocaust & Humanity Project promotes “the protection of human rights against bigotry and hate through arts, education, and public dialogue.” Waller Creek Conservancy’s redevelopment of Waller Creek as a transformational eco-system in our city that embraces strong design and showcases artistic intervention.

MLK Station’s Transit Oriented Development (TOD), meanwhile, is proactively developing a vision incorporating the future homes of Theatre Action Project, Sustainable Food Center and People Fund in concert with housing, healthcare, and economic development/jobs.

I’m happy to report the list goes on and on. But we cannot rest on our laurels. Austin is an engaged community and we must be even more so. And it cannot be just our deeply appreciated and recognized philanthropic and civic leaders, but we smaller players who can make a tremendous difference in our day to day lives.

We must pay attention to the intersections of where our passions for creative expression affect our public spaces. We must endorse the huge role that the arts and creativity play in the economic development of Austin and in the hearts and souls of those of us who make Austin our home.

Just writing this piece has been an act of procrastination (the avoidance of which was one of my New Year’s resolutions!) In the four hours since I sat down at the computer, I let myself get distracted by emails coming in from seven different projects and responded wearing seven different hats.

What is exciting about these diversions, however, is that they are all connected through the lens of culture and creativity — color, light, movement, sound, place, words — which I truly believe are the agents that binds us all together and allow us and our surroundings to grow beyond our dreams.