Who

“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: Paris, Kula, Red Deer, Golden, Dakar, Williams Lake, Netanya, Tijuana, Munich….

I completed a B.A. in Psychology at UBC over two decades of intermittent 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 Vancouver Cultural Alliance (now the Greater Vancouver Alliance for Arts and Culture) that ended after 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 and reflect the reality of their working lives. I believe this has afforded me the opportunity to observe the canaries in the mineshaft of the new economy. Lessons can be learned and extrapolated. I work at that.

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. Trying to get the latter to hear and believe what the “Whos” are saying is equally as difficult and the consequences as life-threatening.

Combining this privileged  input with a broadly eclectic reading and researching compulsion has reinforced my commitment to looking beyond the immediate, backwards and forwards, finding the context for everything. Systems thinking, design thinking, generative solution-finding, whatever the current attempt at labelling these constructs, I love finding and generating metaphors and frameworks that help others see the world differently and still find a place for themselves.

And beyond just spinning ideas and fables, I work to synthesize this information into useful stories that will open closed dialogues and unclog blockages to generate more fruitful conversations and actions for collaboration and a creative economy. My greatest challenge – as is often the case with the artists I’ve worked with – is to document the ephemera that is my own work.