Building Creative Futures

By: Jeff M. Poulin

There is no doubt that we have learned so much as our schools, communities, nations, and societies have experienced and responded to the multitude of changes in the years 2020-2021.

As we begin our year in 2022, we have no choice but to look towards the future, while processing the perspectives we gained having lived through the myriad pandemics impacting our communities in the recent past.

At times, it feels unbearable to think about the loss and trauma coming out of 2020, the uncertainty and mistrust of our institutions resulting from responses throughout 2021, and the drastic and traumatic global events and divisive public policies occurring in only the first few weeks of 2022. Yet, we have no choice but to carry forward – time does not cease; life continues on.

Looking towards the future – in 2022 and beyond – I can only be filled with hope from the harrowing stories of persistence, new opportunities, and community-based support being led by young creatives around the world. As the adults who are committed to cultivating creativity in the next generation, we have a responsibility – a new social contract, if you will, to reform our own practices and to build creative futures.


Curating a New Campaign

Each year, at Creative Generation, we formulate a central question to curate our own inquiries and a theme to drive forward the discourse on a specific topic. In the past we have  spent time thinking about numerous topics such as #KeepMakingArt, Arts & Cultural Education is a Fundamental, Civil, and Human Right, and Creativity for Good.

Emerging from the wide array of our own work throughout 2020 and 2021, we have learned so much from how arts and cultural organizations, education programs, artists, educators, activists, and young creatives have responded to the ever-changing circumstances presented to them from March 2020 to the present. Beginning with an initial inquiry from March – May of 2020, and then expanding throughout the rest of the year and into 2021, our team at Creative Generation sought to understand how arts and cultural education programs, the practitioners within, and the young creatives engaged in those programs were responding to the myriad crises and enabling new futures.

Overwhelmingly, we saw programs, adult practitioners, and creative youth respond swiftly and creatively to the challenges they faced, envisioned new solutions, and constructed opportunities to address the long-standing root causes of those challenges and more.

What became apparent were the key factors to these successful responses:

  • First, we saw that the most agile organizations, empowering adult allies, and responsive creative youth found success build on existing foundations of the type of applied creativity utilized to envisions solutions to the contemporary challenges in their lives

  • Second, we saw that the type of applied creativity previously mentioned flourished where the conditions had already been cultivated through responsive funding, community-developed public policies, and engaged public leadership.

  • Third, we saw the innovations in pedagogies, organizational practices, and public policies, often existed as a result of the actions of leaders – both individuals and collectives.

What we came to term “leadership actions,” became the focus of our inquiry in the latter months of 2020 and into 2021. Personally, I wondered, what makes leaders empowered and resistant within the constant trauma and ever-changing circumstances; simply put…how do they do it?

Over the year, we intend to more deeply explore these questions – specifically focused on how leaders in the arts and cultural education field cultivate the conditions for young creatives to thrive. We have termed this inquiry: Building Creative Futures.

Constructing a Response

With the onset of the COVID-19 global health pandemic in the United States, in mid-March 2020, the team at Creative Generation engaged in some quick response projects, which revealed some immediate learnings. As the pandemic continued and began to conflate with other global traumas impacting communities and youth around the world, we expanded our scope to document, analyze, and respond to the changing circumstances and the innovations involved.

 
 

Very quickly, we learned that a deeper inquiry – and a set of longitudinal observations would benefit our field’s future learning. We were persistent in our belief that through this time consistent inquiry would be key to leverage learning from the challenges we faced as a field. Thus, we continued to expand the scope, add additional inquiries, and construct from intermittent learnings for almost 18 months.

However, throughout this time the use of the term “crisis,” and even “pandemic” changed as rapidly as the mask-wearing policies within our municipalities. What became clear was that it was not appropriate to only examine our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to the multitude of systemic issues which were surfacing during the ensuing months. In all, we found the following five ongoing pandemics were what programs and people were responding to throughout 2020-2021 (and continue to grapple with today):

  • COVID-19 Health Crisis;

  • Economic Inequality;

  • Racial Violence;

  • Political Divisiveness; and

  • The Climate Crisis

It should also be noted that we have listed these in the order to which our team observed a changing response within the arts and cultural education field. We also note that each of these (among others) are intertwined.

Through one of the projects (which I will describe in a few paragraphs), I published an article titled, “Responding to crises: constructing a response through organizational change,” which proposed a model that can be applied broadly  to the response to the pandemics. 

The graphic seen here, has become a regular part of many presentations about how our field, its practitioners, and young creatives in general have responded to the crises. 

 
 

In short, it can be described as a modification of CJ Alvarado’s model embedding the language we heard from over 40 creative youth development programs. Ultimately, what we heard is that there are two paths when people and programs emerge from a crisis or disruption:

  1. Short-Circuit: A path to immediately return to the comfort zone, where they know what they do best

  2. Opportunity: A path to harness the insights and learning to emerge into new opportunities for sustained change

In further research, we applied this model as part of our examination. Over myriad cases (over 20 around the world) where we observed the “opportunity scenario” applied to address long-standing challenges made more apparent by the crises of 2020.


What We Learned

Throughout the almost 18 months of observations (documentation, research, analysis, writing), we learned numerous things from the responses of specific communities in the global arts and cultural education field. The following are the ways in which both people and programs emerged from the crises choosing the “opportunity scenario” to address long-standing issues harnessing their insights from the current crises:

  • Revisit the Moral Compass: People (at all levels) spent time reflecting and articulating their values, principles, and raison d’être to enter a new chapter with a clear focus. 

  • Increased Power-sharing: Programs democratized power between educators and youth, parents and communities.

  • Enable Environments for Social Inclusion: Practitioners and programs increasingly stated their objectives and new programmatic elements to foster greater social inclusion.

  • Strengthened Program Design through Technological Advances: Programs utilized new advances (and literacies) in technology to reach more young people in safe online environments.

  • Continuously Responded to Changing Needs of Young People: Organizations continue to adapt their programmatic elements to address the ever-changing needs of young people. 

  • Focused on Health & Mental Wellbeing of Youth & Families: Programs added new services and engagement strategies (and metrics!) focused on the overall health and wellbeing of students and their families.

  • Increased Participation in Civic Dialogues: Young creatives and program staff used their art to engage in community conversations about changing civic priorities.

  • Developed New Collaborations: Programs worked within and without the arts and cultural or education sectors to develop programmatic components to address the above goals (primarily health and civic engagement)

As a note, most of this work was published in December 2020 by the International Information and Networking Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region under the auspices of UNESCO (ICHCAP).

In each one of these scenarios, what was more notable were the actions of specific leaders – not necessarily institutional or positional leaders like Executive Directors or CEOs, but rather those who were able to affect the changes needed during the time. Thus, we began to wonder about the role of leadership (and more specifically the ability to affect systems change) during the pandemics.


What is Your Role as a “Leader”?

In parallel to the ongoing research and documentation about “crisis response,” the team at Creative Generation was also supporting an inquiry into the qualities of leaders in arts and cultural education programs.  Upon reflection, almost a year later, are the similarities between the two sets of findings – likely because they occurred during the same period of global change.

Speaking to over 250 self-identified leaders in arts and cultural education around the world, we found a field-wide desire  to disrupt, re-orient, re-imagine current concepts of leadership. It was consistently observed that the current organizational structures of leadership do not support the nature of the work occurring in communities and schools today. Further, it was noted that leaders can be transformative to support new models of justice-oriented approaches to leadership development in order to aptly respond to the changing circumstances facing programs today.

Throughout this four-month inquiry, we uncovered a multitude of pathways, which enabled leaders to create the types of changes we observed through crisis response. Study participants identified the need for individuals to engage in personal introspection to enable an environment which supports distributive collective leadership, a new approach to shared, distributed, and collective models of leadership for arts and cultural education work.

Our analysis revealed four inquiry-based processes, which leaders can engage in to achieve distributed collective leadership – these are found represented in the model below. It should be noted that these are called “inquiry-based” because they require a reliance on introspection and critical reflection, utilizing our own lived experiences as the primary source of our internal inquiry.  

In this graphic we see four processes, which were originally shared in the 2020 Young & Emerging Leaders Forum:

  • Unlearning (represented by a thought bubble): The process of questioning the status quo, norms, and current definitions of leadership; reflecting on how privilege and advantage have impacted your own positionality in the field; and interrogating the pathways, credentials, or assumed qualities of leaders in the past

  • Bridging (represented by a bridge between our current place and future place): The process of building connections between self and others; create pathways between communities of practice; and de-silo arts/culture, education, and allied fields of practice

  • Navigating: (represented by a winding river): The process of responding to broader issues within your context (community, nation, world); demonstrating flexibility among changing circumstances; and remaining resilient with goals and a vision for the future in mind

  • Holding Tensions (represented by two people on a see-saw): The process of balancing divergent or converging influences on your work; honoring differences and drawing on similarities between people and experiences; and doing the work, while seeking to make yourself redundant

These four inquiry-based processes can serve as guideposts for the ongoing shift in our view of leadership within the field…but also for how we might approach our ongoing response to the changing circumstances of the multiple pandemics facing our communities.

In one sense, we can view these as a means of professional development to upskill our way into leadership of our programs and organizations – or we can shift our view and think of every one of us as a leader and these four processes as a means of animating that vision to become the reality. This way, we can all affect the changes we wish to see as we cultivate the conditions for young creatives to thrive.

Building Creative Futures

As I mentioned at the start of this article, we have learned a lot through the tragic circumstances of the last few years. As the adults who are committed to cultivating creativity in the next generation, we have a responsibility – a new social contract, if you will - to reform our own practices and to build creative futures. 

So, we have our inquiry: How can we – the artists, educators, organizational leaders, and young creatives – build creative futures?

Stemming from what we learned from the crises of 2020-2021, and the leadership actions (and four inquiry-based processes) of those self0identifies arts and cultural education leaders worldwide, we will pose quarterly prompts to collect the stories and amplify the successes to inspire others to take action.

Previously we investigated “unlearning” and captured so many wonderful ideas found in this archive. 

For now, I encourage you to check out our first call for responses, published just last week:

How are we responding to rapidly changing times? This series will focus on the “Navigating” process, discussed in the last section. Over the year, plan to think deeply about “bridging,” “holding tensions,” and more.

As you look toward the future, how might you view your role as a leader? Where can you drive the systems change you wish to see? How can you apply creativity to the insight learned over the last two years to cultivate the conditions for young creatives to thrive?


This is our time to address the root causes of some of the greatest challenges of our times. As creatives, we have the ability to do it. So, let’s go.