Undervalued Creativity in Community — An Intervention
Introduction:
This paper explores the wicked problem of undervalued creativity in community.
The problem map that precedes this paper suggests two important insights. The first suggests that the systems to which we belong have an entropic effect within the communities we live. This effect results in a depleted concept of creative identity, a reduced connectedness and awareness of community, and a disconnection from family-time. The second insight shows the existence of a creative ecosystem which struggles to express itself as it competes to survive within a shrinking pot of resources. It is a socially entropic landscape that undermines the value of creativity and participative arts in community.
It is not just creativity that suffers. A colonised mindset ‘has rendered […] people insensitive to the true nature of their lives. (Sepie, A., 2017, p.4), and it nurtures social entropy. For this reason, people experience the escalating social, ecological and economic degeneration as spectators, unable to see their roles, or how to intervene. Those called to be the minority ‘activists’ will face the intractable difficulties of waking others from their slumber. However, leading transformation can be a demoralising exercise in a world where the stakes are so high and the clock is ticking loudly. ‘In their striving to do ‘the good,’ [they] almost always end up strengthening the very patterns and behaviours that they have set out to change’ (Steiner cited in Kaplan & Davidoff, 2014, para.13).
In his ‘Provocation’ in the 2013 report The Art of Life: Understanding How Participation in Arts and Culture Can Affect Our Values, Tim Kasser argues:
there is solid scientific evidence supporting the idea that encouraging intrinsic values and discouraging extrinsic values is a promising strategy for promoting personal well-being, a more just and civil society, and a more ecologically sustainable world. (Kasser, 2013, p.12)
He concludes in his paper that ‘arts and culture may be able to contribute to such efforts’. (ibid, p.12). Kasser is among several who have drawn a link between creativity, intrinsic values and the broadminded thinking that might direct our focus toward issues of social justice and the climate emergency. (Crompton, 2016), (Bang, 2015) and (Meroni, 2007). This is an important conclusion that carries hope for those activists who seek to encourage the cultural transformation that might save us from ourselves.
This paper imagines a project that employs participative arts and the capacity for creative thinking in community to reduce the influence of social entropy, to encourage the expression of creativity and to work towards establishing the conditions conducive to a sustainable existence. The paper starts by outlining our guiding principles; It will elaborate on the initial activities of the group, how those activities expanded into the mid term and will finish by describing the project’s status in year four.
The Early Days:
The team was founded in a living room during the pandemic of 2020. Figure 1 shows our emerging thought process as we came together. In this initial meeting we collectively held the belief that creativity had a critical role to play in designing for a sustainable future at the local level. By encouraging the growth of creative identity, we believed that we might inspire the expression of intrinsic values that would allow us to become curious about how to create a truly sustainable future.
Values
The beautiful quote from Affonso Cruz 2016 book Vamos comprar um poeta is translated from Portuguese to say, ‘It is in uselessness that we find altruism and what human beings naturally consider most noble’ (Cruz, 2016, Position 582 of 775). Cruz believes that the beauty of art is to be found in its ‘uselessness’; art begins to lose its beauty when we use it to fulfil a purpose.
Cruz’s belief resonated deeply with our team. The expression of creativity without the need to meet a specific outcome became a central guiding principle. Since we had no goals for creativity, we decided that we would simply work with the intention to:
- Improve the opportunity for quality relationships to form in community.
- Engender curiosity around the capacity to listen and to learn.
- Be inclusive to all corners of our community.
In designing creative opportunities that carried these simple intentions, we found that we could use them as an early tool to reflect on what we were learning.
The Team’s purpose was to explore the role of creativity in the emergence of a sustainable future. We believed that bringing expectations and solutions to a complex system would inevitably land us in the activist’s dilemma outlined by Steiner above. Instead, Allan Kaplan and Sue Davidson’s Delicate Activism informed our approach. In their 2014 book, they quote Tanya Lane who worked as one of a group of social and environmental activists in an effort to care for biodiversity in an area outside Cape Town, South Africa. She described the process of working in conversation with the community as ‘an intentional activity that felt its way forward through inquiry’ (Lane cited in Kaplan and Davidson, 2014, para.71). One of her most powerful insights lay the foundation for our approach:
… we knew we had to practice what we wanted to see emerge, and so we practiced simple acts of humanity … recognising that whatever was, was the seed of what was to emerge from it as well as the product of what had gone (ibid.)
Simple acts of humanity, acts which were thoughtfully informed by creativity was to be our practice. We wanted to engage people in conversation to learn more about how people experienced their lives.
The Bridging Value
One of the insights from the problem map referenced above highlighted the issue that the creative ecosystem struggled to thrive since creative opportunities had to compete for financial and community support. A paradox emerged that showed how creative outlets that initially struggled to survive were less likely to receive meaningful funding and investment. Their viability was questioned since they had trouble funding themselves. Conversely, those initiatives that were able to fund themselves, received funding preference since they were considered viable. By removing ourselves from our familiar economic framework we saw this arrangement as highly problematic. By measuring our support for creativity in economic terms, ‘we contribute to an economic construct that divides and separates us; a construct that arises out of a colonised mindset and that undermines the notion of a thriving creative ecosystem’ (Black, 2020). We were faced with a problem. How could we avoid this ‘value paradox’?
The problem map provided us with a third insight. As we conducted our interviews we noticed that there was an overwhelming sense that creativity contributed to individual and community health. Health in community is experienced qualitatively in terms of stronger, more supportive relationships between people, organisations and systems within that place.
This insight was echoed by Heather Stuckey and Jeremy Nobel in their 2010 paper where they concluded that ‘it is likely that creative engagement contributes to many aspects of physiological and psychological conditions typically associated with improved health’ (Stuckey & Nobel, 2010, p.261). C.L. Bang studied the ‘existing and potential correspondence between the strategy of promoting mental health and participatory community health practices using art, creativity and play in public spaces’ (Bang, 2015, p.62). He studied the experiences of diverse groups who lived in close proximity within the centre of Buenos Aires. Within this area, they held regular street events where all community members were invited regardless of class, ethnicity and background. He concluded that the holding of regular events which embraced the arts, creativity and play in this area had the effect of replacing individualism and competition for solidarity and cooperation; having the effect of a more inclusive community that promoted community mental health (ibid, p.68).
For our project to receive funding and support, we needed to appeal to those whose mindsets remained blind to what might be possible. We needed an anchor point that was consistent with their values and ours. The idea that health might be an emergent property of creativity allowed us to secure it as a ‘bridging value’. We understood that initially we would need to work in community with very little funding, however, by measuring and demonstrating incremental health benefits from our work, we could reasonably seek investment capital while avoiding the ‘creative economic value paradox’.
Pop-ups
Our first actions were designed to understand what it might be like to undertake this work. Our intention was to engage people with a light touch; simple acts of creativity from which we could attract conversations about community, friendships and art. We found opportunities to quietly play the guitar in open public spaces. We called these opportunities, ‘pop-ups’. Our intention was not to do anything but play for between 30 minutes to an hour. We simply observed what it was like for us to organise and convene afterwards to talk about what happened.
We noticed that people would occasionally stop to listen. On those occasions, there were times when curiosity sparked conversation. We held close to our intentions and allowed the topics of discussion to go where they wanted. We would convene after, in a local coffee shop and record notes that summarised the challenges we had in remaining true to our intentions and the topics of discussion we encountered.
We conducted, on average three pop-ups a week for a year, all over the community. Our simple approach allowed us to understand what was required to organise ourselves. Since there were five of us in the core group, we found that we needed to take turns orchestrating events and finding musicians who were able to assist. The community response was positive on the whole. Our pop-ups facilitated the creation of new relationships with community members and provided opportunities for conversations that revealed how people felt about living there.
The Mid-Term:
The first year was spent experimenting with different kinds of creative attractions. There were times when pop-ups meant providing the opportunity for community members to write a response to a statement like ‘I love …’ on a portable blackboard. This kind of popup allowed us to focus on the ‘listen and learn’ intention.
The team also maintained their presence at community board meetings and remained active in community groups such as the Prestwood Nature Association and the Great Missenden and Prestwood Revitalisation Group. It was in connection with these groups that we began to experiment with the idea of community street parties. The intention was to encourage creativity to bring people together so that new relationships could form and new conversations could be had.
Creative Street Parties
Throughout the second year we worked with community groups and the Buckinghamshire County Council in conjunction with the government’s ‘Street Play’ initiative (Street Play — Play England, 2019) to determine opportunities for two events which would be held in the third year. We were cognisant that these events would give us the opportunity to start collecting data that might speak to the health benefits of our creative interventions. We worked diligently with the community to plan and deliver these events successfully.
Gathering Evidence
We recognised our need to find a means of collecting evidence of the impact of our creative interventions, without impinging on our intention to remain delicate in our approach. In their paper for the Arts Council of London, John Carnwath and Alan Brown found that:
the impacts that individuals realise through cultural participation occur in a progression of three stages defined by their temporal proximity to the cultural event: concurrent impacts (sometimes measured through biometric research), experienced impacts (typically measured through post-event surveys and interviews), and extended impacts (typically assessed through retrospective interviewing and longitudinal tracking studies) (Carnwath and Brown, 2014, p.20).
We had no capacity at the time of writing to measure the concurrent impact during our events. Instead, to harvest community impact, we focused on developing options for post-event surveys and interviews as well as retrospective interviewing.
The Future that is Now:
After four years, along the way our project has experienced its struggles. Our team has lost three of its core members and creative resources have been challenging to sustain. We have a small team of people responsible for consolidating feedback from the community. In addition, a new partnership with the Marlow Transition Town initiative has allowed us to share resources and data from our interventions. This data has been used to seek support. While results have been mixed, limited funding has been made available on the basis of our research. We continue to use our learnings to adapt our approach so that we might understand more about creativity’s influence on improved health both to the individual and in community.
One of our core intentions was to foster the curiosity for the capacity to listen and learn. Early in our project, this intention applied to our own methodology, but members of community leadership have expressed an interest in how this intention might improve their connection with the public. We have suggested that creating and holding safe spaces for listening and learning requires facilitation as a skill. Community leaders are currently looking for ways to develop this skill as a role in the village and surrounding towns.
Conclusion:
Throughout the four years, we have operated with the understanding that creativity’s greatest power sits within its ‘uselessness’ (Cruz, 2016); we have been guided by the principles of delicate activism (Kaplan & Davidoff, 2014), focusing more on learning than on solving and we have consistently scrutinised the intentions that have shaped our design. The project has necessarily changed those of us who remain. Our notion of sustaining a ‘delicate’ approach to our work started as a deeply academic idea, but it challenged us at every turn. The beliefs we held that drove our understanding of what might be possible continuously found their way into early conversation; they shaped a significant part of the struggle of the patience required for learning; in time they changed who we were and how we experienced our relationship with place. If everything has changed, one thing has not: the knowledge that our work is only just starting. We have yet to understand how creativity might effectively inspire the broad-minded thinking that could shape the future of our community and the minds of those for generations to come. Could we be right in our hypothesis that creativity might be the catalyst for newly inspired ways of designing; designing our future through the lens of place? The question will remain unanswered, but for me, creativity is simply our greatest offering as human beings. Research shows us flickers of its potential but we are far from seeing the depth of its healing. If the art of living is to learn, and learning is to be within transformation, then I cannot imagine a more beautiful area of study than that of human creativity.
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