This article describes the annual William Inge Festival at the William Inge Center for the Arts which spawns creative arts in the 21st century workforce. In April 2006, the festival will celebrate its 25th anniversary and its tradition of honoring American playwrights, including Garson Kanin, August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Neil Simon, Wendy Wasserstein, Stephen Sondheim, John Guarre, and John Kandor and Fred Ebb. The Annual Inge Festival celebrates the economy and arts themes about which Inge wrote, providing economic return to the community. The March 2004 "The Creative Campus" report from the 104th American Assembly of Columbia University named the innate competition for community economic and arts resources as one of the top challenges to arts in community colleges. The assembly's recommendations for assuring a creative campus included: integrating and embedding projects on campus, inter-institutional partnerships and collaborating and responding to the changing needs of artists and audiences. These recommendations reflect the nearly 25-year growth of the Inge Festival. The festival involves hundreds of local community and college volunteers, students and professors from colleges and universities around the nation, and brings as many as 2,000 visitors to Independence, Kansas, every April.