Creativity
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Connection
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collaboration
culture
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Conscience
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Community
Building
Creative Communities Conference
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Mission:
​To motivate, encourage, empower, and inspire community advocates by sharing ideas, learning new skills, and fostering positive change.
The Building Creative Communities Conference (BC3) is an annual convergence of community change agents that takes place in the tiny, artsy town of Colquitt, Georgia. At this transformational gathering, changemakers from down the road and around the world develop tools for story sharing, creative leadership, and collaboration.
BC3 provides interactive opportunities for people who are invested in their communities, from activists and educators to social justice advocates and politicians, to recognize our power to create positive change in our everyday environments.
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Many participants, after attending BC3 for the first time, return annually to reconnect with like minds and share their progress in their own communities.
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Our conference sponsors include Florida State University, The Social Artistry Alliance of the Southeast U.S., Story Bridge Theater, and GEC Inc.
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Colquitt, Georgia is a modest rural community in the southwest corner of the state that was brought alive more than 20 years ago with the help of conference founders Joy Jinks, Karen Kimbrell, and Dr. Richard Geer. After being introduced to the work of Dr. Jean Houston, the three decided to collaborate on a mission to awaken a dying town by way of mural arts and theater. Once joined by international facilitator Jan Sanders, the group began to share the tools of Social Artistry as a standard operating system for increasing human capacity.
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Colquitt, the home of Swamp Gravy, Georgia's Folk Life Play (which is an outgrowth of Story Bridge Theater Training), now boasts a thriving agricultural community, the Swamp Gravy Community Theater Program, more than 100 murals painted by local artists, historical swamplands, and a boardwalk for meditative strolls through the history of the deep South.
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This small, vibrant town demonstrates the possibilities that the tools of Social Artistry and Story Bridge Theater can bring to life in any community.
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The Art of Social Change
With International Social Artistry Facilitator Janet A. Sanders &
World-Renowned Poet & Facilitator Tannur “SheWrightz” Ali
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Social Artistry is a new model for
leadership created by human potential
leader Dr. Jean Houston. Albert Einstein
has been credited with pointing out that
the same mindset that created a problem
cannot solve it. Many of the problems in
society today stem from leadership that is
ill prepared to deal with the present
complexity and chaos of modern life.
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BC3 offers a brief introduction to the Four Lenses of Awareness and Wall to Wall Workshops for Personal & Community Development.
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Workshops Include:
~Entrepreneurship
~Performance & Leadership
~Literary Activism
~Environmental Stewardship
~Creating & Protecting Safe Spaces
~Co-Creating Local Change
& More!
Story Bridge Theater
With: Dr. Richard Geer & Dr. Qinghong Wei
Participants will be immersed in the
power of story. They will learn to
gather, select, and perform stories
from within the group, and add music,
props, direction, and lighting that will
their bring stories to life.
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The workshop will provide emergent learning
to help participants gain hands-on skills
and deep insights into the Story Bridge process:
Story, Performance, Affinity, Collaboration, Engagement.
Participants will learn the techniques of transforming personal stories into evocative performances, and the principles to engage three levels of awareness (self, relational, system) and generate powerful change in themselves and in their communities.
