Creativity Scouting: What it means and why it matters

What does it take to make a good community great? I think an important part of the answer is appreciating and using the best creations of people who live here. We have organizations that look for and reward good ideas with financial and other support. But is the search deep enough and broad enough to include the work of people without access to these organizations and who are not good at drawing publicity for what they do?

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine, John McKnight, came to Kalamazoo for the annual Forum of The Arcadia Institute and its Community Partners. John’s lifelong interest has been building community. He suggests that the key to building strong communities is to look for the gifts that people have.

This view contrasts sharply with the typical approach of defining the problems, or the deficits of the people living in a given community, and developing a strategic plan to fix the problems.

John’s approach calls for an active effort to find out what people are good at, what interests them, what they really want to do. Any kind of follow-up action plan is based on these strengths or capacities, rather than deficits.

Even in a community like Kalamazoo where we pride ourselves on being very progressive and using the very best practices in our community improvement efforts, we can still learn from McKnight’s approach.

Let’s take that point even farther and address this question: What kind of community could we become if we engaged in a rigorous and sustained effort to scout for the truly creative among us and provide them with the resources they may need to create?

To define the term "creativity" I am drawing on the thinking of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Chick-sent-me-hi), professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. In his book titled Creativity, Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Csikszentmihalyi defines creativity as "to bring into existence something genuinely new that is valued enough to be added to the culture."

So, in this case, to use the term properly the activity must result in a thing we can identify that is new, and that thing (an idea an artifact, a process, a product) must be seen by others as important enough that it adds value to the lives of others.

Csikszentmihalyi identifies three ways we use the term "creativity". The first refers to someone who is "interesting and stimulating", who is considered to be brilliant. This person does not merit being called creative unless his or her talents are used to develop something of "permanent significance".

The second use refers to people who make insightful judgments and may make important discoveries or products but only they know about them. This work in isolation does not meet the standard of being valued by others.

The third use is reserved only for those individuals who have made a contribution that has lasting value to an entire culture and is widely recognized as such. Much has been written about this third use of the term, but we have paid too little attention to those who are in the second group, which are the truly creative among us whose work is either unknown to the rest of the community or only in limited circles and not yet commonly acknowledged by the broader community.

I think that it would greatly enrich the work of community building in Kalamazoo if those whose creativity is not known or known only in limited circles is sought out and supported. They should be the focus of the work of creativity scouting.

I want to begin the scouting venture by focusing on two people in our community who are known in some circles but whose creativity has much to offer an even broader audience. They illustrate what we might do if we invest in a concerted effort to discover and support creativity.

Sydnee Peters is a visual artist and a teacher at the Gwen Frostic School of Arts at Western Michigan University. Twenty years ago she also became a poet when she realized that with one of her entries in her journal she had unintentionally written a poem. From that point on she began to write poetry intentionally, and she has also become highly appreciative of other people who write poetry. Her poetry buddies were an integral part of her thinking when she conceived of an idea that became an important creation.

Her reading of a work by Chet Raymo titled "Honey From Stone"  was the inspiration for the work that others may emulate and that we as a community may use as an example in our scouting. Ramo’s chapters are patterned after the format used in Book of Hours, a medieval monastic tradition of meditation and prayer to be recited at specific times of day.

It occurred to Sydnee that the notion of certain hours in the day that are right for prayer would resonate with some of her friends who are artists and poets.

In this monastic tradition each hour has its own unique light quality, or "illumination", just as each of us our own inner light and creative impulse. So, Sydnee called upon her friends to create a written or visual work around the Hours theme. She wanted the unity of each person’s work reflecting the total project’s title and theme, and at the same time she wanted the participants to develop their own work.

The result was two distinct yet related products: an exposition that was displayed at Kalamazoo Book Arts and a performance of their work by the poets at the Kalamazoo Public Library which included a small book titled Hours, which was designed by Elizabeth King with cover art by Austin Peters. The performance involved poets and an a cappella rendition of five songs by Laura Tribby in the mode of Gregorian chants with words taken from the songs of the Grateful Dead and Nora Jones. The responses to the exposition and the performance lent the kind of validation that Csikszentmihalyi’s definition of "creativity" requires.

Sydnee assessed her work this way: "The beauty of the Hours project is that it allowed me to use all my creative skills at one time from the envisioning of all aspects of the project to the perseverance of overseeing it to completion. In truth, I had not anticipated how rich and abundant the experience would be with creative energy generated by a small community of individuals committed to an idea."

Matt Lechel is certainly not an unknown in our community. He has served on boards of nonprofits, including the Kalamazoo Food Coop Board and the board for the 64th District Service office, both of which he chairs. He is also Executive Director of the Kalamazoo Collective Housing. In none of the community work I discussed with Matt did he claim to be a solitary creator acting alone. In fact he identifies his ability to manage community development projects as his creativity. In Matt’s work there is little distinction between creativity and leadership.

For purposes of this article I focused on Matt’s work with the IDEA Association, which he co-founded with his friend Mark Thompson. The organization began in 2007 to promote social and cultural events and address social issues.

An intriguing part of the mission of the IDEA Association is the assistance it provides other organization to further their creativity. In the application to the Internal Revenue Service to become a tax exempt nonprofit under section 502c3 of the IRS Code, this part of their mission was referred to as "participatory project design", which was not a full blown idea of main focus. Their primary interest was to carry out their own projects.

Today Matt estimates that supporting other people’s ideas is about half of their board’s work. In retrospect it seems that acting as an incubator, or support base, for other organizations is what they do best. Even IDEA Association's current main project "greening" adds to the work of other organizations by contracting with them to make sure that their events are ecologically sound by taking care of their trash and garbage through composting, recycling and landfills.

Since their beginning, the Association has supported organizations like the Boiling Pot, a collection of arts organizations that put on an event at the Arcadia Festival site which continues today and has grown more collaborative. Another effort they supported, the Open Roads Bike Program, has become a strong enough to consider incorporating on its own.

When I asked Matt what motivates him to be so involved in community work, he said that as far back as he can remember he has always wanted to do something, and he has always tried to bring diverse groups and ideas together. Even in his academic work he favored inter-disciplinary studies. The idea of community development through art and education has been central for him.

However, he has made more than general commitment to community development. He has always made the issues of those he defines as "at the bottom" as his priority. Moreover, he does not limit his focus to just individuals. He has been heavily influenced by the work of Peter Block whose ideas on community building have influenced many across the nation and here in Kalamazoo.

Block argues that we have to have structures to implement good ideas for community. He stresses that our spending must move down to people "at the bottom" and not just to larger established organizations. Matt adds that you cannot rely on money "trickling down" because it tends to remain at the top.

Thus the work of the IDEA Association is very consistent with this idea of supporting the ideas of people who are not well known or well connected with sources of money to support their ideas. Matt is optimistic because of the people he sees involved in community work, including a number of people in their 20’s, post graduates and young professionals who are giving their time. He rejects the notion we often hear that we are experiencing a "brain drain" because all our creative people are leaving our community and the state.

When I asked him what steps he would recommend that people ‘at the top’ should take, especially those in organizations with money to grant, Matt said that they need to curb the tendency to fund the "rhetorical", rather than the "real leaders". He also acknowledged that it is not always easy to determine who the real ones are.

The successes of people like Sydnee and Matt shows that some parts of our community are responding to creative ventures. Some are even searching for talent. This kind of outreach needs to be increased.

My hope is that we will develop a commitment and the corresponding structures to look more deeply in our search for people who are already contributing to our community but are not yet known. We also need to invest in those with the potential for true creativity and only need the support, encouragement and nurturing over the long haul to turn their ideas into creations.

Matt and others in the IDEA Associations, and Sydnee Peters and the growing network of artists and poets of which she is part are showing us the way. Let’s draw inspiration and guidance from their creativity.

George Martin received his Doctor of Ministry Degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School.  He has reflected for many years on the interplay between creativity and leadership.

Photos by Erik Holladay