Community of Practice Members
Paul Allen
Paul is External Relations Director for the Centre for Alternative Technology.
Paul has lived with and worked with renewable energy technologies for over 21 years. He is currently responsible for external relations & partnerships at CAT. The role also includes acting as spokesperson for the media, author of a wide range of publications and feature articles. Current projects include, directing the Zero Carbon Britain programme, presenting positive scenarios to a wide range of organisations and arts groups including UK Parliament, Smithsonian Natural History Museum, French National Assembly, the Happy Museum Project and the Case for Optimism. Paul is also a practicing musician.
Arterial Network
The Arterial Network started as a dynamic, continent-wide network of non-government organisations, creative industry companies, festivals and individual artists engaged in the African creative sector. It is now a more formal network with a Secretariat based in Cape Town, East African regional secretariat in Kenya, with regional secretariats (West, Central , South and North) in the pipeline.
Mike Van Graan, the celebrated South African playwright and cultural activist, is the Secretary General of Arterial Network.
Tony Butler
Tony is a museum curator at heart. He is director of the open-air, Museum of East Anglian Life (MEAL) in Suffolk, which was one of the first in the UK to operate as a social enterprise. Stewardship, participation and mindfulness are its other core principles. In 2010 he founded the Happy Museum project to explore how museums can be connectors within civic society and contribute to thinking around Transition and well-being.
Jessica Carson
I am an artist working directly in social contexts, developing and managing programmes in and teaching at third level.
Teo Greenstreet
Teo is a co-convenor of The Case for Optimism a workshop programme exploring the role of creativity, arts and culture in fostering a life sustaining world, working with Hilary Jennings and Lucy Neal, developed with the Clore Leadership Programme.
He is also Sustainability Associate of CIDA and In Smart Company, promoting Innovation/creativity in enterprises: www.cida.org www.insmartcompany.co.uk
and Associate of Encounters and a freelance consultant to the cultural and creative sector with a background in running cultural/creative organisations and developing creative environments (co-founder and CEO The Circus Space CEO The Media Centre). Teo has a particular interest in developing leadership skills and incubating cultures of sustainability.
Chris Grady
I have worked in Theatre and the wider spectrum of arts and charity administration for 30 years. I seek to be a mentor, support, and creative champion for a wide range of artists, small companies, and those involved with complementary medicine and spiritual healing. It is this combination of art and spirit which excites me as we move through challenging global times and a re-think of our place within humanity and upon the fragile earth. I hope I am an enabler, an agitator, and a collaborative worker - I look forward to seeing how I can best look at and support Alternative Futures.
Dougald Hine
Dougald is a writer, an internet entrepreneur (The School of Everything), an informal learner (Temporary School of Thought) and a founder of organisations with over-the-top names like The Dark Mountain Project and The Institute of Collapsonomics. He is interested in creating spaces for learning and reflection and has founded The Space Makers Agency and is thinker-out-of-residence with the Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment project at the University of Westminster.
Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability (ICSCS)
ICSCS is a New York based agency whose mission is to foster public awareness and policies that strengthen art and culture’s central role in civic life and enhance cultural, community and environmental sustainability. Their main objective in all initiatives and partnerships is to identify and assemble data that serves this mission. They work with individuals and organisations across geographic, income and sector boundaries, who have obvious synergies with these goals, and whose activities and initiatives are complementary but not redundant.
Paul Nagle is Director of ICSCS and Lise Brenner is Associate Director. They are a founding partner of re.think.
Hilary Jennings
Hilary is a freelance consultant working across the creative and cultural and education sectors. The focus of much of her career has been supporting and promoting partnerships and networks for learning, skills and more recently leadership development. In recent years she has developed a focus on exploring community and cultural approaches to the economic and environmental challenges that currently face us. This work includes the Case for Optimism, the Happy Museum Project and SustainableAbility. I'm also founder co-chair of Transition Town Tooting.
Tim Kasser
Tim is Professor and Chair of Psychology at Knox College, Illinois. He has authored numerous scientific articles and book chapters on materialism, values, and goals. He published The High Price of Materialism in 2002; Psychology and Consumer Culture in 2004; and Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human Identity (co-authored with Tom Crompton, also in the re.think Community of Practice) in 2009.
He contributed expertise to the Common Cause paper and is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation (also in the Community of Practice).
Pat Kane
Pat Kane is a musician (with Hue And Cry), a writer (author of The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living book and blog), a consultant, a theorist and an activist. He is currently developing a 'book-net' called Radical Animal on balancing innovation, sustainability and human nature.
Ola Kotska
Ola works in Community Development in the Ukraine
David Micklem
David Micklem is Joint Artistic Director of Battersea Arts Centre with David Jubb. Together we strive to fulfil a mission to invent the future of theatre. We're preoccupied with what comes next in performance and how this work can play an increasingly central role in our lives. We want theatre and the building that encourages it (our home in a former 19th century town hall) to be vital to the health of our community - a community of artists and participants. David is also chair of WildWorks (www.wildworks.biz) a landscape theatre company based in Cornwall and a director and trustee of Artichoke (http://www.artichoke.uk.com/) who work with extraordinary artists in the public realm on events that change the way people look at the world.
Bridget McKenzie
Director of Flow Associates, consultant for cultural organisations, aiming to mediate between the domains of culture, ecology, education and technology to initiate an ecologically literate Age of Smart. Flow has offices in London and Delhi. I blog about culture and ecology on http:ecoch.wordpress.com
Lucy Neal OBE
Lucy is interested in the art of social sculpture and how celebratory events act as a catalyst for change. Co-founder director of the LIFT Festival, her recent work explores the role of the arts in The Great Imagining - the shift to a more ecological and life-sustaining society. Co-author of MMM's SustainableAbility, she is Happiness Associate on the Happy Museum Project and involved in the Case For Optimism. Active in the Transition Town movement since 2008, she is co-chair of Transition Town Tooting and producer of TippingPoint Commission, The Trashcatcher's Carnival. She is currently researching Playing For Time, commissioned by Green Books, a handbook of Transition and the Arts. She is co-founder of Taking Up Space, a CLP funded network, looking at the transformative role of the arts in systemic change within communities.
New Economics Foundation
nef (the new economics foundation) is an independent think-and-do tank that inspires and demonstrates real economic well-being. They aim to improve quality of life by promoting innovative solutions that challenge mainstream thinking on economic, environment and social issues. nef is unique in combining analysis and policy debate with practical solutions on the ground, often run and designed with the help of local people. They also create new ways of measuring progress towards increased well-being and environmental sustainability.
'Economics as if people and the planet matter'
People United
People United is a participatoryhttp://www.peopleunited.org.uk/ arts organisation and creative laboratory. Our work explores, celebrates and demonstrates the values of altruism, creativity and a sense of community through our artistic practice. We do this through commissioning artists, creating imaginative new work, and supporting and sharing good ideas.
Tom Andrews is the Founder and Chief Executive of People United. He has worked for 17 years in the arts, education and community sectors, he is a practical innovator, creating, testing out and professionally evaluating social programmes that can be replicated and shared.
julie Reynolds
Julie is a researcher/curator in the museum sector, London Museums Group blogger and PhD student at the University of Manchester. Interested in capturing the human narrative around objects in collections and reporting on skill sharing in the sector.
Mark Robinson
Mark Robinson founded and runs Thinking Practice which exists to help the arts, cultural and other sectors create a fairer and more beautiful world by increasing impact and building resilience through creative approaches that combine thinking (analysis and strategy) with practice (doing and learning).
Carys Shannon
Writer, creative producer, cultural coach, dedicated cyclist and lover of the sea. Interested in imagining a positive future and sharing this with a wider audience.
Stojan Pelko
Stojan was State Secretary with the Slovene Minister of Culture, Majda Širca (2008 - 2011). He was key-note speaker at The 4th World Summit on Arts & Culture (Johannesburg 2009), CultureWatchEurope Conference (Bruxelles 2010) and EUNIC Cultural Diplomacy Seminar (London 2011), concentrating on the role of culture both in creating conflicts and in conflict resolutions. His recent interventions both in theoretical and political fields are based on the writings of authors such as Slavoj Žižek, Toni Negri and Alain Badiou. Stojan was creative director of the communication project “Slovenia – At home in Europe”. He established the communication consulting agency Korpus in 2000, He is former editor-in-chief of the national film magazine Ekran, lectures on film theory at the Department of Sociology of Culture, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and in audiovisual research at Universite de la Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris III. He has published several books including participating in the globally-translated best-seller on Hitchcock, Everything you always wanted to know about Lacan (but were afraid to ask Hitchcock), edited by Slavoj Žižek. His last book: Podoba misli (The Image of thought, 2007) on the relations between film theory and philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
Peter Stott
Presently Heritage Team Leader with Falkirk Community Trust, Peter has worked in the UK museums sector for over 30 years in London and Scotland. Where possible, within his own organisation, and through his roles and networks across the wider cultural sector, he advocates the need for active evolution in response to the sector’s changing ecosystem.
Positive Solutions
Positive Solutions purpose is to strengthen cultural and social enterprise through targeted consultation and training. Our work informs policy, assists with decision-making and planning, or enhances industry knowledge. Sensitivity to local cultural contexts is a keynote of our approach.
Jan-Bert van den Berg
Jan-Bert is Director at Art Link Edinburgh and the Lothians. Artlink works hard to increase opportunities for individuals who experience disadvantage or disability to take part in the arts in Edinburgh and the Lothian region. We offer practical support to get you to the arts and work with venues to increase opportunities to enjoy the arts. We explore how the arts can work for you through establishing creative partnerships with artists and create possibilities to get involved in your community
Tom Wakeford
Tom Wakeford is a writer and participatory researcher. Having initially trained as a biologist, he became increasingly interested in issues of vernacular creativity, sustainability and justice. For the last fifteen years he has collaborated in a range of deliberative processes, many performed using the analogy of a legal jury, in the UK, India, Brazil, the EU and Zimbabwe. Tom is Senior Research Fellow at both the University of Exeter's Drama Department and the University of Edinburgh’s School of Health in Social Science.
He is also an advisor to the European Commission, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Indian Supreme Court and Common Cause. A former Director of PEALS, he is now a Visiting Fellow at the Newcastle University’s CultureLab. He is a founder member of SPEAKS, the Society for Participation Engagement Action and Knowledge Sharing and blogs for Research Fortnight.
WWF-UK's Strategies for Change Project
WWF-UK's Strategies for Change Project re-examines some of the assumptions that underlie current environmental campaigning, and suggests new evidence-based responses. In particular, the project looks at the importance of collective social values in driving change, and at the ways those values are shaped.
Angharad Wynne-Jones
Angharad is Director of TippingPoint Australia and The Climate Commissions energizing the cultural response to climate change. She is also Creative Producer at Arts House, Melbourne, a contemporary performance centre - a City of Melbourne contemporary arts initiative.