If there’s a bright spot to be found in this dismal economy, it’s the fact that hard times have fostered a new sort of resourcefulness in the arts community, marked by ingenious collaborations among one-time competitors. In this climate, you don’t get very far with a go-it-alone, territorial business model anymore — and that’s doubly true for small and mid-size outfits. Whether you’re talking about individual artists getting together to form gallery co-ops or put on pop-up exhibitions or arts businesses pooling resources, staff and audiences for maximum reach — the cultural scene in the Twin Cities is brimming with creative joint projects.

Case in point: the new Twin Cities Literary Punch Card.

The idea is a straightforward play on an old-school customer loyalty gimmick beloved by coffee shops and video stores everywhere. You visit a “Lit Punch” reading and you’ll get a punch on your card; buy a book while you’re there, and they’ll punch your card twice. Collect 12 “punches” between August 2011 and August 2012 and you can redeem your “knocked out” card for a $15 gift certificate to put toward buying something from one of the “Lit Punch” participating bookstores.

What’s remarkable about this little project is that it’s a genuinely collaborative effort which brings together everyone who’s anyone in Minnesota letters. All the local literary presses are in on it — Graywolf Press, Milkweed Editions, Coffee House Press – as well as the The Loft Literary Center and “Rain Taxi Review of Books.” The cities’ big, independent booksellers are on board, too: St. Paul’s Common Good Books and Micawber’s Books, Minneapolis’ Magers and Quinn Booksellers and the University of Minnesota Bookstore.

Erin Kottke of Graywolf explains: “One day, someone from Milkweed was commiserating with someone from the Loft about how attendance has been steadily going down at readings. Twin Cities presses tend to deal in high-quality fiction, but we don’t really publish a lot of blockbusters by really well-known writers. Charging for admission to readings, the way some bookstores in other big cities are doing to break even, just isn’t a reasonable business model for us.”

“What we do have here are wonderful literary organizations. Why haven’t we figured out a way to pool our resources? We got the idea to try Lit Punch from something we did last year, when we worked together on a cities-wide literary scavenger hunt. It got such a great response, we decided it was time to try doing something bigger together and something ongoing.”

To my mind, even though it’s a charming idea, the point isn’t really filling the punch card or even the promise of the gift certificate or “mystery package” of swag you’ll get upon completion. Frankly, I know I always lose things like these before I even come close to cashing in the rewards anyway. What’s exciting is this sort of project reflects a paradigm shift I’m seeing elsewhere in the arts community, too: rather than approaching audiences as passive consumers of a product, programs like “Lit Punch” encourage an arts-loving public to do more than open their wallets, to become engaged participants in the arts and culture in their communities (in the case of “Lit Punch,” with card-carrying membership privileges, no less).

Such collaborative programs also offer a new way to think about success, where doing well means organizations and arts businesses work together to cultivate and grow an audience base so that everyone can prosper — a vision that has less to do with competition than with interdependence. It’s a business model built around capitalizing on solidarity and on providing arts audiences with access and opportunities for engagement, rather than just deals and discounts.

It’s a simple idea, but one rooted in a perennial truth, especially for those working in the arts: When we all do better, we all do better.

The “Punch” launch party/Literary Happy Hour will be at Club Jager tonight, beginning at 5 p.m.; 923 Washington Ave. North, Minneapolis, 55401. “Punch eligible” St. Paul-based literary events for September include a reading by poet Jean Miriam Larson at Micawber’s Books, Sept. 15 at 7 p.m.; 2238 Carter Ave., St. Paul, 651-646-5506; at Common Good Books, William Kent Krueger will read from the latest in his detective Cork O’Connor series, “Northwest Angle,” on Sept. 20; and the two-author team under the pseudonym Michael Stanley will read from their new novel “Death of the Mantis: A Detective Kubu Mystery” on Sept. 21; 165 Western Ave. North, St. Paul, 55102. For a full calendar of this month’s “Punch eligible” literary events, visit the Lit Punch website or the exhaustive Twin Cities literary calendar from “Rain Taxi.”