re.think is a global platform designed to activate and support everyone working with art and culture to make the world more liveable.
More and more people are coming to the realisation that there is something very wrong. We are coming up against the limits of our planet’s capacity to support us and are living beyond our means.
Yet, despite growing awareness that our planet has finely balanced and interdependent ecosystems and limited natural resources, we continue to selfishly squander them. As a result, key assets that we depend on are getting scarcer and our climate is changing. Our current model of economic growth, which has encouraged our over consumption is broken. Our wellbeing is declining and inequality is rising, fuelling conflict, mass migration, poverty and many other social problems.
Things have to change and we need to act fast if we are to find new economic and social paradigms that recognise the limits of our finite planet and enable all life to flourish. We need to begin by transforming the values of our society and economy within a generation. We need to find more ways to understand each other, disrupt vested interests and imagine and create more sustainable ways of living.
Mission Models Money’s belief is that art and culture are integral to this process of evolutionary change.
Art and culture are one of the most participative, dynamic and social forms of human behaviour. Their capacity to trigger reflection, generate empathy, create dialogue and foster new understanding means that they can offer a powerful and democratic way of expressing, sharing and shaping values. By helping to create an environment, and state of mind, directly conducive to the creation and development of new ideas, they challenge the status quo and provide spaces where anything is possible. They can help us build new capabilities and understand how to imagine a different way of being. They can enable us to design useful and meaningful things and are increasingly the basis of livelihoods and enterprises that are motivated by much more than profit.
re.think aims to show how art and culture’s expressive energy can be harnessed to help us make the leap to a livable world and offers a global platform for everyone who shares this goal. (re)think will encourage recognition of arts and culture as an abundant resource with a vital role in helping us address the global challenges we face, able to galvanise action and effective change in values, mindsets and policies .
In order to achieve this we will bring together artists, designers, producers, curators, entrepreneurs, economists, academics, environmentalists, psychologists, scientists, technologists, activists, community organizers and campaigners to share practice, exchange ideas and start new projects together
Together we will explore, connect, disrupt and invent. We will find out what it is about the particularity of arts and culture that can help us rethink our future, discovering what works and why. We will help the people who still make the big decisions to make better decisions by understanding the integral and interconnecting role of art and culture in the great transition that lies ahead. We will mobilize our collective learning throughout our community of practice in order to stimulate the systemic change we need. We will join up our hope and optimism to that of others in the effort to push humanity on to its next stage of development so that we can make the leap to a livable world.
Bibliography
WWF (2008) ‘Living Planet Report’
Rees M. 2003 ‘Our Final Century’
Lovelock J. 2009 ‘The Vanishing Face of Gaia’
Gilding P. 2011 ‘The Great Disruption’
MEA 2005
IPCC 2007
Stiglitz J. 2009 ‘Freefall’
http://www.neweconomics.org/programmes/well-being
Wilkinson R. and Pickett K. 2009, ‘The Spirit Level’
http://assets.wwf.org.uk/downloads/common_cause_report.pdf
for more of an explanation of the importance of values in responding to the challenges we face
http://www.wwf.org.uk/wwf_articles.cfm?unewsid=4224
Rifkin J. 2009, ‘The Empathetic Civilisation’
http://www.sustainableability.com