My Purpose

I work in the service of communities of place, impact and interest to the benefit of creative, cultural and spatial justice; to sustain and nurture creative and cultural practitioners, the arts and cultural institutions; and to gather research, theory and practice in the one dynamic and porous space.

My Mission

I work to:

• put cultural institutions in the service of people;

• decentralise knowledge;

• promote relative expertism, the coda that expertism is horizontal and equitable;

• enhance the understanding of the power of culture;

• support communities of place, interest and impact to know their own value and to move from feeling powerless to being powerful;

• enable creatives and cultural organisations to transform how they do things, and for & with whom;

• and for the individual to connect to the larger whole of community and culture.

Coda

I want the work I do to have a positive impact on the climate and ecological emergency we are in today and I give respectful thanks to our campaigning and indigenous caretakers of the environment, from whom so many of us are learning from and would not be here today without. I adhere to the values and ethos of the Coventry UK City of Culture 2021 Green Code in my working life and ask those that I work with to consider adopting the same - to move from environmental sustainability to responsibility and to behave climate-sustainably to live climate-responsibly.

In partnerships, I work to the ABCD Trust Model, designed by Ken Blanchard, that expresses collaborative behaviour through the values of Ability, Believability, Connectedness and Dependability. Ability – demonstrate competence. Believable – act with integrity. Connected – care about others. Dependable – maintain reliability.

I commit to intentionally co-creating brave and safe spaces. Brave spaces, where participants feel comfortable learning, sharing, and growing – and all credit to Micky ScottBey Jones and her poem An Invitation to Brave Space for this terminology and understanding, created as part of her leadership in The People’s Supper. Safer spaces, where a person or category of people can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment, or any other emotional or physical harm, and adhere to the Social Art Network Safer Spaces Agreement and Online Participation Guidelines and advocate for their adoption by those I work with.

Why I do what I do

My values

change-making / collaboration / exploration / authenticity / care

I value the arts to talk across difference and through our lived experience, and as a generative call to action.

I value the role of the creative and the cultural individual and organisation in society.

I believe in the social and civic role of cultural and learning institutions; and in radical the potential of placemaking, as necessarily community-led, to make positive material, social, environmental & ecological and economic change. In both my cultural work and in my placemaking practice, I hold the citizen and community as expert in their own place and their right to have their say in what it is like and how it is run and place the arts front and centre.