GENUINE COLLABORATION: Diving Into 2023 at Creative Generation

By Katie (M.K.) Rainey

Since 2019, Creative Generation has conducted myriad campaigns through its Campaign for a Creative Generation, which is dedicated to empowering young creatives and their communities, by providing a hub for stories, resources, and opportunities.

Each year, Creative Generation selects a theme for the year’s campaign and, through that theme, narrows down to a specific topic each quarter. In the past, we have included topics like Building Creative Futures, Creativity for Good, #KeepMakingArt, International Arts Education Week, and Arts & Cultural Education is a Fundamental, Civil, and Human Right. 

Where We’re Going

This year’s campaign is Intergenerational Collaboration. 

We do this as a collective in order to forge a path for the coming year: This process both guides our work and that of the community of practitioners with whom we work. As a teaching artist, this works a lot like a guiding question for me. It helps us keep the work we do in line with our values. 

In 2023, we’ll focus on a different aspect of Intergenerational Collaboration each quarter. The following are the themes we will explore:

  • GENUINE COLLABORATION | engaging with + empowering young people

  • REDEFINING ELDERSHIP | examining multiple possibilities of truth

  • VALUING WAYS OF KNOWING | honoring how and what we know

  • BUILDING TRUST | fostering sustainable relationships

Genuine Collaboration

We’re beginning the year by focusing on what genuine collaboration means. It’s easy for an individual or organization to say they value collaboration. But what does that really mean? 

For me, as Director of Communications, it all comes back to power and how we’re able to identify and share it in our work. I wrote about power sharing last year for our HOLDING TENSIONS series, which you can read here. As a Director, I have to name that coming into most situations at work, I hold a certain amount of power and that it is my responsibility to figure out how to share that power and uplift my community. 

Genuine collaboration is recognizing that power and letting it go so that someone else in the collective may pick it up and use it. I think about genuine collaboration a lot in my classroom because that’s what I want my students to feel—like they are working in collaboration with me and not that they are doing work that I assign. It gives them ownership of what we do together and that creates buy in. The same goes for colleagues and employees at all the different jobs I work. The more power I relinquish to others, the more perspectives are invited in and the more collaborative our projects become. 

This worked well with our previous series. At the end of 2022, collective members contributed blogs to our HOLDING TENSIONS series. They wrote about a vast array of topics ranging from the tension between art and academia to honoring our whole selves in social justice spaces. If you haven’t caught up on the previous series, I implore you to do so. Our collective members are already brainstorming rich, new ideas for our upcoming series. 

Want to write on the topic? 

We’re looking for blogs on this quarter’s theme: Genuine Collaboration. We want to collaborate with you and amplify what’s happening in your world, whether that’s direct in- or out-of-school arts and cultural education, administration, advocacy, field-wide services, or your personal artistic, cultural, or creative practice.

You should feel free to do any and all of the following:

  • Articulate your opinion;

  • Share trends you observe in your work;

  • Amplify the voices of young creatives;

  • Interpret academic writing;

  • Elevate projects and people; or

  • Document promising practices to support innovation in the field.

The post should be:

  • Be approximately, 500-750 words, though we can accommodate more or less, if the topic requires

  • Use headers to break up different sections

  • Embed links to references, whenever possible

  • Send us photos or videos to include!

  • Check out our blog guidelines here.