Bill Roper

Creativity Will Change the Model

Posted by Bill Roper, Nov 08, 2011 2 comments


Bill Roper

Bill Roper

On behalf of the Orton Family Foundation, I was recently visiting communities in Montana and Colorado, assessing whether they would make good Heart & Soul Community Planning demonstration projects. Part of my message during this tour was that community building and planning is broken in the United States.

Approaches to engaging the public over the last 30 years have become top-down, tired, and seemingly irrelevant. Who wants to come to a meeting to provide input on a plan developed behind closed doors and when it’s pretty clear a decision has already been made? Who ever catches the notices in the newspaper or on the bulletin boards that all look the same, are always in the same places and use technical or hot button words like updates, zoning, transportation trip levels, etc.?

In a country that expects another hundred million people by 2050, we’ve got to wake up and shake up the usual way of doing business.

To move from the left brain to the right brain, to excite people and entice them or inspire them to participate, to open up the government model and build on the assets found in our human, social, and natural landscapes. Art and the creativity it embodies and unleashes can play a critical role in this regard.

Creative change can start simply by looking at how a meeting is being advertised…what picture will draw people in? Then a new use of language (art is often about creating something new), focusing on words or ideas that matter to people will also make a huge difference. And how about using art or other creative tools to allow people to express themselves?

Maybe start with the sharing of personal stories, a centuries-old and creative form of disseminating vital information and key values (Re-Weaving the Community, Creating the Future: Storytelling at the Heat and Soul of Healthy Communities).

And how about engaging school kids in painting pictures of what they’d like to see in their community and using their work to foment other community-wide discussions? And why not ask adults to produce pictures, poems, songs, etc. that captures what is most meaningful to them about their place?

Take a look at a project in Starksboro, VT, that did just that and experienced record levels of participation and a far greater understanding amongst its townspeople of the issues and opportunities that lay ahead. And for another example, consider the Knight Foundation’s new funding program for integrating the arts in community building and development.

Art allows us to tap into something different and immediately moves us from the traditional to the exciting and provocative aspects of our life, our community. It has been terribly under-utilized and under-valued, but now the time is right.

Take the risk. And actually how big is the risk when the old ways of convening, conversing, and collaborating aren’t working anyways?

2 responses for Creativity Will Change the Model

Comments

November 15, 2011 at 1:09 pm

Barbara: good question on scale...one we hope to answer in one of our next round projects. I think a critical aspect to look for is the extent of arts or artists in a community shows a receptivity to this form of expression. After that it takes a community and a local governement ready to embrace this form of content, conversation and connection...and a great leading artist and project coordinator to really lead the way.

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November 10, 2011 at 12:11 am

Great post Bill. Your blog unites examples and stories in this salon around the theme of creative engagement and points up the need and opportunity to spark connectivity and meaningful participation in communitity decisionmaking. A question that arises when I think of projects like Starksboro and the other examples offered is... Can these projects - based in imagination and creative process -- be scaled up? Can they be tranferred from one community to another or is their success tied to the unique context and chemistry of the artists and communities?

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