WCCA and Economic Development

Most people are aware, economic development includes more than event attendance. The attention given to nurturing and building an audience and a cultural community plays an important role which will ultimately produce economic spin off.

It is important to note that, on an annual basis, WCCA presents numerous music concerts and performing arts shows of various genres, programs that showcase artist, and other cultural institutions, and youth media programming, and educational events. Each week you are bound to find new TV shows on WCCA , featuring discussions with authors, craftspersons, poets, and promoting cultural events throughout the city, are all accompanied by in depth news coverage, in numerous languages, each going beyond the 60 second sound bite found in most commercial news segments.

The above reflects WCCA's proactive role in nurturing and inspiring artist and future artist, cutlural enthusiast and temps audience curiosity. Whereas the video content presented on WCCA TV is created by volunteers, video artist, writers, each show is a unique cultural event in itself. This is all only a small part of what WCCA accomplishes in its daily operation as it has for the past 22 and half years. WCCA volunteers and staff are building community and contributing to economic development through electronic media everyday.

The daily cultural events on WCCA TV are presented to over 55,000 cable subscribers in addition to hundreds of web subscribers each week.

At another level, WCCA averages about three open house ( in-house) cultural events per year. In 2006, WCCA celebrated it's twentieth birthday. We recorded an average of about 2100 attended these events over the last five years. This number does not include our television production classes and special workshops, volunteer projects and outreach activities off site, in addition to about an average of 60 persons per day foot traffic into our facility who participate in the creative process of television and community media production.

Public Access is important for a city, reaching into the homes of audiences contributing to not only a free flow of information and fresh ideas, it adds tangible vibrancy to Worcester's downtown core in a unique and inclusive way. WCCA TV is vitally important for Worcester and it's economic development.