Constructing a Collective

By: Jeff M. Poulin

Over the last few blog posts, we have described our process to determine and articulate our mission, vision, goals,  and values.  In the below post, I’d like to share more about the Collective of people who make up the team at Creative Generation.

Our Origin Story

Creative Generation first began in April 2019 as a research initiative. Just me at the time, my inquiry focused on exploring the language used to describe the outcomes of arts and cultural education. Upon completion of the first study, and the presentation of my findings in a few strategic professional events, the scope of research expanded to understand how arts and cultural education can enable young people to lead social change all around the world.

At that time, I was unable to take on the scale and scope of a large project myself, so I engaged some help: storytellers, researchers, and documentarians, to be specific. This work unveiled evidence of a clear need for field-wide paradigm shifts in pedagogies, organizational practices, public policies, and leadership pathways within the intersectional sectors of culture, education, and social change. And so came smaller, discrete projects which explored various elements of these shifts.

As we began to grow, Creative Generation — the organization —started to formally organize in October 2019, receiving its status as a Public Benefit Corporation, registered in Washington, D.C. USA, in January 2020. 

Since then, in conjunction with numerous collaborators and co-conspirators around the world, the group of artists, educators, administrators, researchers, storytellers, and activists

Who make up Creative Generation has produced global messaging campaigns, conducted original research, published extensively, and supported programs and people leading transformative creative projects worldwide.

Constructing a Contemporary Collective

Arriving at the model of the Collective was not always apparent. Through our organic growth, the group – which we now refer to as a Collective – formed naturally, responsive to the needs of the work. As time passed, we continued to evolve to meet the changing needs of our own personal and professional circumstances, continuously building on the foundation set in 2019.

During the lockdown of 2020, as we closed our doors from late March – July, the then-laid-off members of our collective thought long and hard about our formation and chose the “Collective” model.

The concept of a ‘collective’ is one that has been explored extensively in the fields of political organizing, leadership, and organizational structure. Defined as a group of individuals, who share a particular interest or outlook, working together on a long-term basis. (To learn more about Collectives and how they are established and utilized, check out this zine). Often used in the cultural sector to provide a structure for a group of artists (i.e. an artists’ collective which shared a common space), we re-applied this term to designate the formation, knowledge-exchange, and decision-making for our ever-evolving group.

We really viewed our work through the lens of collective leadership. In 2018, Cassandra O’Neill and Monica Brinkerhoff provided a set of indicators for Collective Leadership in Nonprofit Quarterly: Collective leadership is a process where:

  • Members view their organizations as systems;

  • Operate with connected networks;

  • Share and/or rotate decision-making;

  • People are inherently capable and can be trusted to do the right thing; and

  • Success comes from the diverse perspectives and skills of many.

This model provides many benefits, including the efficiency and innovations towards the shared goals as well as the mutual growth and benefits of the members.

About a year later, our Collective led a global study on leadership within the arts and cultural education field, which concluded by identifying a necessary shift towards this model (one the field named “Distributed Collective Leadership”) in future arts and cultural education programs – learn more about this landmark study and its findings here. 

As a capacity building and learning service organization, we most aptly recognize the power of the collective for its alignment to our mission, vision, goals, and values. In his paper “Knowledge Beyond the Individual? Making Sense of a Notion of Collective Knowledge in Organization Theory,” German scholar, Achim Hecker, concluded an empirical study with three conceptualizations of collective knowledge:

Collective Knowledge as Shared Knowledge: Knowledge originates from the common experiences and knowledge-sharing activities of a group of individuals, enabling a the group to coordinate their activities without centralized decision-making or explicit mutual communication.

Collective Knowledge as Complementary Knowledge: Knowledge is distributed among peers interacting in a complementary way; in coordinated social practice these disjunctive knowledge sets complement each other in such a way that they ‘add up’ to more than their sum.

Collective Knowledge as Knowledge Embedded in Collective Artifacts: Knowledge is incorporated into organizational artifacts rather than individual mindsets or actions; it is collectively owned, tangible representations such as documents and databases, but it is also more implicitly embedded in artifacts, such as operational processes, knowledge products (like papers, reports, audio/video presentations, etc), and the like.

Though Hecker’s paper treats these three conceptualizations as different and often exclusive, we view them as integrated and all part of our collective work.

Our Collective Today

As our work continues to grow and expand, we are focusing on the types of collective knowledge we have and pursue in the future. We regularly fluctuate between 9 and 25 members of our collective, depending on the season, set of active projects, and types of knowledge production in-process.

Members of our global community can stay up to date with the current (and alumni!) members of our Collective on this page on our website. 

Each individual member operates a little differently. In efforts of values-alignment and transparency, you can note a bit about each person’s role in their biographies, including:

  • Role & Title: These describe their level of organizational responsibility, like development or implementation of organizational strategies, and the type of work they do.

  • Focus: This describes the type of knowledge they bring to the Collective.

  • Portfolio: This describes the types of projects they work on.

Additionally, we also have synchronous and asynchronous team members, depending on their availability to meet internally together or externally with collaborators. We also have project-based team members who specifically focus on a singular project. Altogether, it makes up our collective led by our shared values and working towards our same mission, vision, and goals.