PORTLAND – Creative Portland, a nonprofit organization established by the city in 2008 to capitalize on and improve Portland’s creative economy, introduced a new website Thursday that promotes Portland as a great place to live and work.

LiveWorkPortland.org will be a resource for creative entrepreneurs and others who are thinking about moving to Greater Portland. It also will help link members of the region’s creative community.

“I get phone calls all the time from people interested in moving to Portland or from people who have just moved to Portland and they want to get plugged in, but they don’t know where to turn. LiveWorkPortland.org will answer their questions,” said Jessica Tomlinson, director of public relations at Maine College of Art.

In a broad sense, LiveWorkPortland.org is part of a larger campaign to promote Portland as a creative epicenter, said Patrick Costin, a Portland architect and a Creative Portland board member.

The initiative was unveiled during an after-hours party at the Portland Museum of Art on Thursday.

The website, in development over the past year, includes multimedia interviews with nationally recognized people who live in Portland or operate their businesses in town. Their stories are testimonials about the virtues of living and working in Maine’s largest city.

Among those profiled are Angela Adams and Sherwood Hamill, a husband-and-wife design team who operate an internationally known lifestyle brand business on Munjoy Hill; John McVeigh, a professional opera singer and jewelry designer who recently moved to Portland; Daniel and Marcia Minter, an artist and a creative director who moved to Portland from Chicago in 2003.

The site includes stories about the city’s renowned dining and literary communities, and specific information about neighborhoods, schools and creative infrastructure.

Essentially, it tells the story of Portland through the lens of the city’s arts and cultural community, Tomlinson said. “This is not the Convention & Visitors Bureau or the Portland Downtown District. It’s not about tourism. It’s about how creative people make their lives in this town.”

Creative Portland evolved from the city’s effort to promote the creative economy, which began under former Mayor Jim Cohen. He spoke at Thursday’s event.

It is funded through the city’s creative economy tax district along Congress Street. The program allows part of the value of new investment to be used to promote arts and cultural events, and to support innovative business initiatives.

 

Staff Writer Bob Keyes can be contacted at 791-6457 or at:

bkeyes@pressherald.com

 

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