I’ve been talking a lot about what Greensboro can become.

We’ve talked about housing. Transportation. Mental health. Downtown development. Jobs. Neighborhoods. Public spaces.

Those things matter enormously.

But there’s another part of building a great city that we don’t talk about nearly enough.

Culture.

Music. Art. Poetry. Theater. Dance. Festivals.

The things that make a city feel alive.

So as part of my vision for Greensboro, I want to work with the City Council and our arts community to create something new: a Greensboro Music & Arts Council, with dedicated leadership whose job is to help make Greensboro one of the most culturally vibrant cities in the Southeast.

And I don’t mean another committee that meets once a month, drinks coffee, takes minutes and produces a report nobody reads.

I mean activity.

I want music in our parks.

I want artists painting murals.

I want sculptures and installations in unexpected places.

I want neighborhood concerts.

I want jazz downtown.

I want rock and roll.

I want gospel.

I want hip-hop.

I want bluegrass.

I want classical music.

I want young musicians playing alongside people who have been making music in Greensboro for fifty years.

I want theater and dance and poetry spilling out into public spaces.

And I want this happening throughout Greensboro—not simply downtown.

Because culture shouldn’t belong to one neighborhood.

It belongs to everybody.

Imagine going into one Greensboro neighborhood on a Friday evening and finding a small concert.

Saturday afternoon, somewhere else, there’s an art market.

Saturday night downtown, there’s live music.

Sunday afternoon, there’s a performance in one of our parks.

And maybe sometimes we close a street and simply say:

Tonight, Greensboro belongs to the people. Come outside.

Eat something.

Listen to music.

Look at art.

Meet somebody you’ve never met before.

That’s community.

And here’s another idea that I absolutely love.

I want Greensboro to have a City Poet.

Think of it as our own poet laureate.

And one of that poet’s first assignments would be simple:

Write a sonnet to Greensboro.

Fourteen lines about this place.

Our history.

Our people.

Our struggles.

Our beauty.

Our contradictions.

Our hopes.

And then years from now, another poet writes another one.

And another.

Imagine what we’d have fifty years from now.

A literary history of Greensboro, written by the people who lived here.

I’d love to hear those poems at civic celebrations, festivals, graduations and public gatherings.

Because government doesn’t always have to communicate through reports and PowerPoints.

Sometimes a city can communicate through a poem.

Sometimes it can communicate through a painting.

Sometimes through a guitar.

Sometimes through a kid standing on a stage for the very first time.

And there’s an economic side to this, too.

When people talk about vibrant cities, they’re usually talking about places where people want to be.

People visit them.

Young people stay in them.

Businesses recruit people to them.

Restaurants thrive.

Hotels fill up.

Neighborhoods become destinations.

And creativity becomes part of the identity of the place.

Greensboro already has tremendous cultural assets. We’re not starting from zero.

The opportunity is to connect them, amplify them and ask a bigger question:

What would Greensboro look like if we treated culture as part of the infrastructure of the city?

We build roads because people need to move.

We build parks because people need places to gather.

We build water systems because people need water.

But human beings need something else, too.

We need connection.

We need beauty.

We need laughter.

We need music.

We need stories.

We need places where somebody who’s 19 and somebody who’s 79 can stand next to each other listening to the same band and, for a couple of hours, forget everything that supposedly divides them.

That’s the Greensboro I want to help build.

A city that’s financially strong.

A city that’s safe.

A city that’s compassionate.

A city that’s innovative.

But also a city that’s fun.

A city with a personality.

A city where on a beautiful Saturday afternoon you don’t sit at home wondering what there is to do.

You wonder:

Which thing should I go to?

That’s a very different question.

And maybe someday somebody visits Greensboro for the first time, walks down Elm Street, hears music coming from somewhere, sees a mural around the corner, discovers a performance in a park and asks:

“What is going on with this city?”

And one of us gets to smile and say:

“This is Greensboro. This is what we do.”