On Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, I documented the Akumal Arts Festival as a model of Creative Placemaking, which positions artists in the roles of civic leaders, culture bearers, and change makers. Inspired mural artists from around
Community Engagement of Orange County, CA has awarded Catalyst Muse Creativity & Change Consultancy a $10,000 grant to make a short, documentary film about the 4th Annual Akumal Arts Festival (AAF) on Mexico’s Caribbean coast.
I planned to write about creativity, but empathy, a disposition that supports creativity, offered a more urgent topic. Masks are required again indoors where I live in Los Angeles County. We all hoped that this phase of the pandemic was
In 2015, ten years after Hurricane Katrina, Paul Ramnauth Algu of Louisiana State University studied resilience in New Orleans residents. He wrote, “at its core, resilience is defined by reaction to disturbance.” One of his
“Hey, you should join our group!” I heard author Sue Ganz-Schmitt say, as she walked by me in Pine Tree Circle, Topanga’s version of a strip shopping center. I knew Sue through our involvement with
“None of us are perfect, but all over the place in every community and field of endeavor, there are people who are working generatively with the challenges before us; meeting them, rising to their best human capacities — at least on their good days — and creating new possibilities and realities. They’re not publicized, they’re not investigated, but that landscape is as real and important as that landscape of everything we can point out as failing and corrupt and catastrophic. “
