About CCB
Creative Community Builders was launched in 2003 as the vehicle for Tom Borrup’s consultancy based in Minneapolis and Miami.
Tom soon began helping clients of all kinds across North America and beyond. This work placed Tom and CCB at the forefront of thinker/practitioners in the interrelated fields of community cultural development, creative community building, and creative placemaking.
For a list of recent projects, see the Projects page.
About Tom Borrup
Tom’s 25-year career in nonprofit arts and cultural management helped him appreciate the valuable role of artists and engagement with communities in the process of finding, forming, and leveraging meaning in the everyday and in the extraordinary.
After 20 years of constant travel as a consultant, speaker, educator, and writer Tom has worked with cities and towns across the U.S. and to many parts of Europe, Asia, and Latin America – allowing him to witness the vast variety of ways people of different cultural, social, and economic backgrounds see and experience their communities and engage in cultural practices.
Earning a Ph.D. at mid-life opened the worlds of research and theory, helping Tom grow as a scholar-practitioner. His Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 2015, examined grassroots leadership structures in urban cultural districts seeing how stronger cross-sector or “horizontal” networks resulted in more equitable and sustainable communities.
A prolific writer, Tom speaks and leads workshops across the US and around the world. He currently serves as Senior Lecturer and Director of Graduate Studies for the University of Minnesota Arts and Cultural Leadership Program and Civic Engagement Program. He also teaches in the Ph.D. Program for Arts Management at the University of Kentucky and in the Summer School of the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, China. He has taught for Drexel University, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the New Hampshire Institute of Art, The Ohio State University, and the University of Massachusetts, and Purdue University.