The gathering brought together 50 artists, community leaders, graduate students, funders, and academic researchers for a two-day exploratory session. The workshops, creative activities, walks, and reflective conversations activated ways to mobilize creative practice as modes of leading, connecting, and building more just and imaginative futures. The gathering cultivated new relationships, deepened established connections, and embodied a relational approach to knowing. Topics included how to foster leadership, strengthen social health and impacts, and ways to deepen civic engagement. By mobilizing creative practice as a form of worldmaking, this convening animated and illustrated how artistic strategies cultivate new forms of collaboration, reimagine shared spaces, and generate meaningful social change.

The event kicked off with a series of workshops on May 29, based at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in Soulpepper Theatre in downtown Toronto. The first session was a Storytelling Circle facilitated by CLCF PI ME Luka. Hannia Cheng told an extraordinary story of community mobilization through creative practice based in Toronto’s Chinatown. These included a personal and family story of growth woven through the telling of the creation of Tea Base, a community-led creative space, and the subsequent mutual aid and land co-op organization, Friends of Chinatown Toronto (FOCT). Marcus Young shared the genesis of Everyday Poems through a Public Art Residency in St Paul’s a decade ago. This collaborative community-engaged work of inserting poetry in sidewalks over time is a remarkable tale of how urban planning, creativity, artist residencies, and citizen engagement result in more liveable spaces. Last but not least, Zahra Ebrahim from Monumental Projects shared the step-by-step experience of learning how host and launch a community parade helped not just disperse tensions about urban development planning but also generate a sense of joy and connection in the neighbourhood. This resonated strongly with Luka’s experience in co-founding and co-leading Narratives in Space + Time Society in Halifax, which was able to mobilize public art walks and parades to generate conversations, recommendations, and actions related to redevelopment in that city.

The second session of the day was led by PlaySpace principals, Shannon Litzenberger and Mairéad Filgate, a lively embodied movement experience that got everyone up on their feet and moving around. This was followed by a walk to Corktown Commons, where participants were encouraged to listen, contemplate, and connect to nature, most particularly to the many trees in the midst of this increasingly gentrified downtown neighbourhood. The session was hosted by Wild Soma, a collective that encourages deep connection through embodied engagement with human and more-than-human elements.

The final session of the day was hosted by Helen Yung, Laboratory for Artistic Intelligence, one of CLCF’s frequent partners. In this wrap-up discussion, Helen led participants through an exploration of the meanings and modes of artistic intelligence, including ways in which this connects to creative and relational leadership and facilitation for research and community/civic engagement in complex issues. CLCF researcher Mark Campbell, CLCF PI ME Luka, and Helen Yung followed up these conversations with many Canadian leaders in creative and embodied leadership through additional sessions in Amsterdam and Brussels during the last week of June.

On May 30, in Currie Hall at the National Ballet School, the first workshop, “Vital Signs: Worldmaking Through Embodied Health,” was led by members of Sweet Labour Art Collective, including Ruth Douthwright and Sarah Kim. In this session, participants used embodied movement to find ways to express care for people and resources. It included considerations of how healing takes place in healthcare and community settings alike. The second workshop of the day was led by Victoria Mata, Expressive Arts Therapist. It incorporated a classic arts therapy exercise of contour drawing with your non-dominant hand, and discussions about healing, identity, and cultural memory, including how these come through creative practice onto a page or into a performance or through an approach to administration.

Additional participants in the two-day event included Aderonke Akande from the City of Toronto, Patty Pon from Calgary Arts Development, Rohan Kulkami from Soulpepper Theatre, Claude Schryer, host of the Conscient Podcast, Michael Trent from the Metcalfe Foundation, artist-scholar-activist Syrus Marcus-Ware from McMaster University, Michael Murray from the Ontario Arts Council, Jane Marsland, longtime consultant extraordinaire in the arts sector, and several graduate students and faculty researchers from University of Toronto, including Nasim Niknafs and Dan Silver, both involved in U of T’s Creative Communities Commons.