About Program

Program Highlights

• Interdisciplinary
• Collaborative
• University and Community Partnership
• Multi-generational Faculty and Learners
• Democratic
• Reciprocal
• Research and Experiential Application of Working Models of Creative Community
• Diversity of Community Building and Democratic Engagement, Rather than Single, Specialized Approach
• Community Practitioners, Internship Mentors and Advisory Board

The core components of the Creative Community Building Program include:

CREATIVITY AND SOCIAL SCULPTURE

“Every human being is an artist … called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and condition our lives.”
- Joseph Beuys, Artist

This Creative Community Building program recognizes the creative capacity of each individual and provides strategies and tools for individuals and groups to deliberately develop and apply more of their creative thinking. These approaches enable communities to proactively imagine their future together, rather than merely reacting to solve problems. Community well-being and the common good can be enhanced through such collective creative expression.

This Creative Community Building feature emphasizes interdisciplinary, ecologically and socially engaged work, informed by reflection on the social sculpture ideas and work of Joseph Beuys, Shelley Sacks, and related thinkers and practitioners.

Social sculpture encourages an openness to the possibilities for the many different ways in which people can explore their own creativity, and then express it in meaningful ways within their organizations and communities.
Social sculpture is a worldview in which our thinking, feelings and actions are all artistic, creative processes. By combining these processes of regeneration, we shape – indeed, we sculpt – society as a creative work of art. This process of creation is social sculpture.

Topics include: Processes for thinking in new ways; skills, tools and strategies for creative thinking and action; imagination; strengths focus; change; creative leadership; purpose and meaning; individual, organizational and societal creativity; arts, culture and aesthetics; engagement; learning and education; personal development; and creative community.

COLLABORATION

“Cultures live or die not because of their natural endowments but according to whether their ideas sustain life.”
- Frances Moore Lappé, Small Planet Institute

This approach shifts from the highly specialized or tunnel vision approaches common in both education and community development. Instead of a competitive and fragmented social life, this topic seeks as an alternative, conflict-resolving partnerships.

For example, such partnerships might be between the university and its neighboring communities; within those communities (and the university itself); within workplaces; etc.

But partnership and collaboration may, or may not, challenge established power relationships. One partner’s knowledge or resources may carry more weight than that of others. Or a specific “collaboration” may leave out or continue to disempower severely marginalized folks. In Creative Community Building, collaboration means more than “working together.” It also involves a dimension of power sharing and of extending and receiving equal respect.

Cooperatives models are sought, in which autonomous associations of persons are united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise (International Cooperative Alliance). Cooperatives value and seek to inspire self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, solidarity, honesty, openness, care for others, and social responsibility (Cooperative Development Institute).

Topics include: Communication; collaborative processes; workplace democracy; cooperative economy; participatory budgeting; diversity and integrating differences; coalitions; community agriculture; and collaboration.

EVERYDAY DEMOCRACY

“Democracy deserves the best thinking possible. … The right of an individual to create new ideas and to expect a respectful, supportive climate for their expression is a human right too often ignored.”
- Berenice Bleedorn, Educator

This approach seeks to move away from top-down and coercively controlled institutions, where a few “leaders” or “experts” decide what is best for all and impose it by force on everyone else.

In Creative Community Building, everyday democracy goes beyond the rejection of these blatantly undemocratic forms, and contrasts as well with more subtle forms of disempowerment, such as those that discredit the voices of under-educated or “under-age” people or which prevent ordinary citizens from sharing power with their elected representatives or even holding them accountable.

Democracy is real only when it empowers citizens by providing avenues and resources for all of their voices to be heard and all of their gifts to be recognized. In short, where it fosters their creative and collaborative engagement.

Topics include: Democratic participation; democratic governance; an expanded concept of art; citizen dialogue; participatory public art; creative economy; sustainability and ecology; politics and direct democracy; peace and non-violence; community well-being and quality of life; and human rights.