How do you capture a decade of slow, relational, place-based change, and turn it into a model others can follow?
Betting on Artists as a City’s First Movers
In 2011, Mark Buller’s building materials company expanded into Montgomery, Alabama. On a tour of the historic downtown led by then-mayor Todd Strange, Mark Buller and Sarah Beatty Buller were struck by both the beauty and gravity of the place, and by how much of it sat empty. Rather than demolish and rebuild, they began buying and restoring historic properties and reinvesting in the cultural life waiting to bloom there.
That instinct grew into a decade of patient, arts-centered investment. In 2018, Sarah Beatty Buller Founded MAP360, a nonprofit to cultivate Montgomery’s artists, storytellers, and culture ecosystem. The Bullers’ premise was simple and unconventional: artists are the first-mover entrepreneurs of community-led revitalization, and arts is the infrastructure that creates culture, spurs economic growth, and restores social cohesion.
More than a decade in, the Foundation sought to distill ten years of organic growth into a clear narrative of change and a roadmap for the field. They engaged Third Plateau’s Research & Evaluation team — a group of creative evaluators known for blending professional rigor with human-centered storytelling — to lead a comprehensive retrospective impact evaluation that honored the complexity of their work.
Measuring What Resists Measurement
Creative placemaking is slow, relational, and hard to count. The evaluation had to honor that without losing rigor. The work required us to:
- Evaluate a decade in hindsight, reconstructing the strategy and intended outcomes of work that began long before any evaluation framework existed.
- Capture impact that conventional metrics miss, including trust, belonging, and a community’s growing sense of its own worth.
- Center community voice in a place defined by its history, gathering hard truths without extracting from or re-traumatizing the people who shared them.
- Produce something useful within and beyond Montgomery, so other family foundations and funders could learn from the model.
Together, these defined an evaluation that had to be both rigorous and deeply human.
The result was Staying Power, a retrospective evaluation documenting how ten years of creative placemaking reshaped Montgomery’s downtown and creative life: an estimated $39.75M invested, 55 spaces restored or reopened, 300+ artists supported, and roughly 1.5 million people reached through public art and programming.
An Evaluation Built on Listening
Third Plateau designed a qualitative, story-based evaluation grounded in the voices closest to the work. With the Foundation team, we first co-developed a retrospective theory of change, mapping the inputs, strategies, and outcomes that shaped a decade of investment.
From there, our researchers conducted 17 in-depth interviews and a focus group with artists, culture bearers, small business owners, and civic and philanthropic leaders, alongside a review of documents, photography, and media. We qualitatively analyzed the data, pairing deductive coding against the theory of change with inductive coding to surface emergent themes, then tested our interpretations with the Foundation in a shared sensemaking session.
Throughout, we moved at the speed of trust, prioritizing dignity, consent, and care so the evaluation honored the community it documented.
From a Decade of Impact to a Roadmap for the South
Staying Power synthesizes ten years of change into five throughlines: momentum builds, apertures widen, gates open, spaces awaken, and souls grow. It captures not only what was built, but what it meant. Local artists exhibiting at the Urban Art Fair in Paris. A once-hollowed downtown coming back to life. Neighbors who began to believe again in the worth of their place, and themselves.
Just as important, the evaluation distilled six lessons for funders weighing similar work: signal early, nurture life, press forward, get proximate, find conspirators, and resource fairly. Together they offer other family foundations a practical guide to long-term, community-centered investment in the arts.
The report has already become a tool for the field. The Foundation has used it to anchor a national learning journey to Montgomery, convenings with philanthropic partners, and a panel at Grantmakers in the Arts on the persistent underinvestment in Southern culture. What began as one family’s bet on a single downtown is becoming a model others can follow.
For Third Plateau, the partnership deepened both our work in the American South and our long history alongside family foundations. It shows how rigorous, story-based evaluation can turn a decade of impact into momentum for the next one.
Does your foundation want to understand, and share, the impact of its work? Reach out to start the conversation.
