<How can we enable diverse and equitable participation in the shaping and naming of shared things?
What is the work that is needed to enable us to do that within institutional settings?>
This self-initiated research draws on my personal art practice as a lens to explore organisational thinking and policy in my work within a community embedded arts organisation* with a unique organisational structure. My practice so far has served to work through inner and personal experience. Lately I have found the ideas, language and symbols that form my creative landscape to be a useful way to reflect on questions of equality and shared leadership, social and climate justice, collective care and responsibility.
Within this, I am considering slow transformation, particularly acknowledging and drawing on individual and cultural systems of value, faith and belief, guided both by a particular working context* and my own lived experience.
I began this creative research by exploring In-Situ's unique organising structure; the fluid structure.
This is the way we refer to the sum of equal pay, fluid leadership, equal say, consensus decision making and the creative and personal development of the team.
This is characterised by a culture of trust, permission to fail, open reflection, reflexive practice, support to pursue creative ideas, using coaching approaches, adaptations around difference and building equity, respect, awareness and compassion.
This culture is shared and evolved by people with very different cultural, religious, lived and professional experience to participate equally in the development of the organisation and our work.