Brushy Fork Annual Institute

Building Community Leadership Through a Social Artistry Approach

Track Leader: Janet Sanders

Social Artistry is an emerging discipline in leadership development and community building. The approach taps inherent human wisdom for greater creativity, compassion, and resolve.

Join us to create a new future through the power of participation and creativity. Attendees’ concerns, challenges, hopes and ideas will shape the focus of the workshop. Using the arts, play, and story we begin to heal our communities and restore a sense of well-being, vibrant community life and the local economy.

An intro to Social Artistry for community building will:

  • Develop  awareness of your strengths as a community leader
  • Engage the genius of our cultures, traditions and environment
  • Develop break-through projects to shift the community story
  • Move your vision to reality
  • Explore ‘Best Practices’ on innovative community building initiatives 
  • Develop the four levels of active imagination for dynamic vision and action
  • Develop participants’ own natural capacities for creativity and leadership
  • Understand the ‘Stages of Change’ in developing sustainable actions and how the arts can facilitate that journey
  • Explore your community through four key levels of social artistry. This will provide a preliminary analysis to develop a break-through project.
  • Creating art forms which release the past to move into the future
  • Develop natural capacities for creativity and leadership
  • Develop the practice of joyfulness for yourselves and as a way to sustain community building
  • Expand on the role of storytelling as an approach to social change
  • Develop the ability to flesh out dreams and take your vision to reality
  • Appreciating the Rural Volunteer
  • Four questions in building creative community:
    What is the new story for our community?
    What are projects that align with the new story?
    How do we overcome fragmentation and engage in creating the new story?
    How do we sustain ourselves in the midst of creating a new community?

Track Limit: 25

Janet Sanders is a facilitator, program designer, project manager, and trainer with 20 years of international experience with the Institute of Cultural Affairs (in a UN-ECOSOC consultative status). She has 16 years consulting experience in strategic planning and policy development as principal of PEOPLEnergy, which included twelve consulting assignments with the United Nations involving comprehensive development in Nepal, Japan, USA and First Nations and consultant to the Ontario (Canada) Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. She has worked with the Swamp Gravy Institute in Colquitt, Georgia, providing facilitation skills and program content on ‘The Art of Social Change’ for the Building Creative Communities Conference, 2008-2012.