“Forging Enterprising Relationships”
- Conceptual and strategic thinker.
- Acts as a freelance facilitator and process consultant for bridging the cultural gulf between arts and business.
- Interventionist for blocked groups and – proactively – for the development of effective, outcome-driven processes.
- Fascinated with the human framework for business outcomes.
- Synthesizes information and language from cultures in opposition to find where common understandings can begin.
I currently do my thinking in Vancouver, B.C., where I was born, mostly raised and return to from wherever life has taken me over the past 60 years: Netanya, Paris, Kula, Red Deer, Golden, Dakar, Williams Lake, Tijuana, Munich….
I completed a B.A. in Psychology at UBC over two decades of occasional attendance punctuated by a wide variety of life experiences, from the mundane to the sublime.
The most consistent elements throughout this life have been: a strong connection to community service, an anthropological interest in common human behaviour and a post-modernist approach to social justice, with much of my formative time being spent in the nonprofit and civic government sectors.
Since 1995, when I began a six-month contract at the Alliance for Arts and Culture that eventually lasted 12 years, I have been working with artists and other creative and unconventional humans and pulling together the language to describe economics and development in terms that encompass their working lives.
I often feel like Horton the elephant in the famed Dr. Seuss story “Horton Hears a Who”, because my ears seem to pick up the voices of artists differently than do many bureaucrats and policy-makers. Combining this privileged input with a broadly eclectic reading and researching compulsion has reinforced my commitment to systems thinking.
And to synthesize this information into useful stories that will generate more fruitful conversations and actions for collaboration and a creative economy.
