curious patterns #13
Learning partnerships and the nonprofit hunger games, organisational innovation in the artisan economy, and some personal news.
This one will be a bit different. Why? Because we got multiple things to celebrate! 🥳
First off, curious patterns is one year old! 🎉
What grew out of a lockdown project turned into something I very much look forward to compiling every month, reaching out to fascinating folks in the field, and putting down my own thoughts for the whole wide world to read. Well, there’s some 220 of you readers now and I appreciate every single one of you for affording me that trust to populate your inbox, and hopefully your thoughts. Thank you!
Secondly, this issue is reaching you from hotel quarantine in Cambodia 🇰🇭
Yes, after almost two wonderful years in Aotearoa, my partner and I have moved back to Cambodia - and I couldn’t be more excited. This move comes with a bunch of other changes, the biggest of which is me going all solopreneur. So, may I introduce you to my own consultancy, edge & story. If you’re looking for someone to help out with some work, I’m only one message away. Evaluation? Absolutely! Research? Most definitely! Sustainability & strategy stuff? Hell yeah! Policy work? Yes, please!
Over the past weeks and months I also had several conversations with friends and colleagues from across the globe, and we are all ready to collaborate, whether it’d be on empathetic digital facilitation, non-Western-centric approaches and resources for arts management and cultural policy education, or other projects that are located elsewhere in the culture x development cosmos. I am also super excited to be able to spend more time on some pet projects, such as a DIY musician backend organiser in Notion, a public directory of Cambodian illustrators and animators, and an edited volume that you will soon hear more about. If you feel like collaborating or have great projects of your own you seek collaborators for, hit me up 📨
Lastly, I have just completed the first part of the Arts for Good Fellowship of the Singapore International Foundation, which was an absolutely joy. Being in a digital space with 31 other super inspiring fellows and the lovely SIF staff and facilitators almost made up for not being able to meet up in person. We explored issues of inclusion, wellbeing, and the potentials of technology in the arts. And I am so excited to be working and growing alongside all these amazing A4G Fellows over the next couple of months to develop and test ideas on how to use art and technology to meaningfully engage disadvantaged youth in digital spaces. I’ll keep you posted.
In conclusion, I want to continue writing curious patterns and make it a resource for all of us out there, who care about equity, fair cooperation and sustainability in everything culture and development. I also invite you to reach out if you want to share your favourite resources, shape some thoughts into a guest article, give feedback or just have a friendly chat - I would love to hear from you: kai@edgeandstory.com
NEWS
💌 In the mood for some soul soothing? Then grab a cup of tea and watch these beautiful Letters to Creatives in video format from across Africa and the Middle East.
🇵🇭 The ridiculousness of a YouTubepreneur trying to sell a $15-course on an ancient Filipino intangible cultural heritage, and why the creative industries need to listen up.
🎧 Working with indie labels, focusing on Arab content and catering for local payment challenges wins the day - that’s how they do music streaming in the Middle East.
🌎 This IDB report takes the pulse of the LATAM and Caribbean audiovisual sector. Promising opportunities for homegrown streaming content and inclusive employment.
💰 You get an essay, and you get an essay, everybody gets an essay! The cultural impact investing cheerleaders at Creativity Culture Capital have plenty new reads.
🇺🇸 When a former diplomat needs to sing the praises of UNESCO for American lawmakers to consider rejoining. Will Biden trip over the Palestine issue, though?
🇮🇳 The beats in the bus go round and round. Or something like that. Delhi has a new mobile music studio to make music production available to disadvantaged youth.
🎨 If you suffer from chronic white colonial gaze, here’s a checklist on how not to reproduce harmful visual narratives through images in development programmes.
🤖 What the heck is the metaverse? This publication explores the future of shareable cultural infrastructure and arts ecosystems in shapeable virtual environments.
SOUNDTRACK
📻 I know that some of you like to save curious patterns for the weekend to have enough time for reading through all the shared content. If that is the case, or if you’re just looking for some cool jams from around the globe, tune into this mixtape!
With love - from me, to you ❤️
IMPACT
🤝 M&E, MEL, MEAL, MERL: what’s the acronym flavour of the day? Michelle Man from NPC is reflecting on the L, the learning part, and how commissioning a learning partner can have different benefits than commissioning an evaluator. For some, this might just be a semantic difference or a strategy to approach evaluation hesitancy, but I really like the idea of actively centring learning to make sure that any new insights in an organisation or a project don’t stop being useful at the time of acquisition. Yes, there will be internal benefits, and perhaps even some external ones.
🧰 Don’t you just love open source tools? The KoBoToolbox is a free surveying tool that was developed with humanitarian missions in mind. This means its forms have some beautiful functionality such as offline use and neat geo-mapping options whilst being super low-barrier. It might not look exceptionally pretty, but this is actually more of a feature, not a bug. If you’ve ever needed survey forms, try to switch out your Google Forms and give KoBoToolbox a shot.
🇮🇳 From informality to the ‘new formal‘
Business of Handmade: The Role of Craft-Based Enterprises in ‘Formalising’ India’s Artisan Economy (2021: Priya Krishnamoorthy, Anandana Kapur, Aparna Subramanyam)
A few months ago I noticed a participant at the #ShiftThePower - Beyond Grants: Driving System Change Across the Ecosystem webinar asking a question about funding modes for cultural and creative industries. Intrigued, I did what every self-respecting researcher would do: I stalked that person’s LinkedIn profile. Turns out, Priya is the founder of 200 Million Artisans, an initiative that wants to reimagine the potential of craft in India - innovation through knowledge, resources and collaboration. I was instantly hooked and contacted Priya, who pointed me toward their latest research that was to be released soon. And I am so glad she did!
Here we are: Business of Handmade is an immersive, multimedia research project that is a refreshing take on how research can be presented and made more accessible. It’s an interactive website, rich with photos, videos and audio for each of the featured artisan enterprises. But if PDF is more your thing, you can also download the comprehensive report from the site.
Of course, you could skip straight to the findings, but I urge you to take some time and read through the incredibly diverse case stories. They not only share systemic reflections of the wider sectoral and societal challenges that plague India’s artisan economy but also provide the right amount of specificity and local context for us to better understand the unique problems and solutions of each craft enterprise. Simply great and insightful storytelling!
Among many more, the case stories include:
iTokri: A curated e-commerce platform for handicraft products with fair margins and without additional intermediaries.
Kadam: A relationship and trust-based nonprofit training provider for artisans with an attached for-profit platform to kickstart sales for these independent artisan enterprises.
rangSutra: A large social enterprise where artisans are also shareholders in the company that employs them.
Jaipur Rugs: A hand-knotted rug enterprise that centres around a decentralised, home-based workforce that encourages artisans to also design their products.
But let’s dig a little into the findings 🧶
The New Formal is definitely the one to look into. Business models in India’s artisan economy are increasingly, and creatively, marrying aspects of the informal economy with elements from the formal economy. This is not just to make things work in each local context but to create new opportunities through market and supply chain access as well as social protections, mobility and learning benefits. To me, these approaches encapsulate what innovation really means: respecting and valuing the cultural richness of ancient practices whilst creating positive social and economic outcomes through creative adaptation in today’s systems.
For policymakers, researchers and funders, the authors of Business of Handmade have a special message: Find the right metrics and start measuring the seemingly informal, understand the very specific and hyperlocal needs and gaps, and then make it your mission to create responsive infrastructure that actively supports decentralisation of artisan enterprises and acknowledges the multiplicity of operational models these come in. Why? Because it benefits all of us!
The ethos of craft-based production is clearly pro-nature and pro-people. The artisan economy has an innate ability to drive socioeconomic mobility, conscious production, and mindful consumption.
You see, this research is not just about India and its 200 million artisans. It’s about a way of respectfully approaching cultural heritage and socio-economic realities in an effort to create a liveable future for us all.
On a side note that should not be underestimated: Both the design of the interactive, multimedia website and the layout of the publication are stunningly beautiful and functional. Typeface with character, lots of white space to digest information, uplifting colours, photos and illustrations, on-point highlighting and backlinks - bravo!
LIMINAL SPACE
🎬 In the US, nonprofits were going to compete for funding in a reality show. They called it The Activist, and it had social media counters and celebrity judges. Big ones. Like Priyanka Chopra-big. Luckily, they cancelled the show or want to turn it into some documentary format. Whatever. Vu Le made his own list of 10 shows about nonprofit and philanthropy that would be way better than “The Activist”. Little disclaimer: this might be hitting a little too close to home for some. Enjoy!
🎥 There is also good impact cinema out there, don’t worry. WaterBear is essentially Netflix for impact documentaries. Except, it’s free. And all its content is dedicated to the future of our planet. What’s not to love? So after you’ve binged Squid Game, start watching Seahorse. Neither is about maritime life anyway.
🎲 The intern of the Portuguese Commissioner for Culture comes up with an intriguingly reasonable proposal. If this isn’t the best setup for a role play game ever, I don’t know. ifa and EUNIC, the publishers behind the EU cultural policy simulation game Giving Europe a Home, sure know how to write an intriguing promo text, and I AM HERE FOR IT! Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll find another 17 European cultural policy geeks here in Phnom Penh that want to spend 8 hours with me to play out how France is just being difficult again.
OPPORTUNITIES
13 - 22 October: Cooperation in a Fragmented World (online conference)
🔥 Nicely spread out over two weeks, this online conference is taking it slow. And I don’t mind. People’s schedules are busy and the Zoom-fatigue struggle is real. On the content side, we’ve got some big topics (and big names): colonial legacies in cultural cooperation, how we can use post-COVID recovery to create more equitable cooperation, and what the role of today’s powerful actors should be through the lens of ethics. Reacting to these in discussions and reflections will an incredible line-up of speakers, many of whom I respect a lot. Check it out!
🎓 And if academic publishing is your thing, here are two calls for papers that I am sharing way ahead of the deadline so you busy bees can mark it in your calendars:
30 April 2022: Heritage as a Driver of the Sustainable Development Goals (Heritage)
curious patterns is a monthly email newsletter on all things culture, impact and development, written by Kai Brennert (Twitter | edge & story).
Thank you, lovely people at Goethe-Institut 🇩🇪, Nordicity 🇨🇦, Goldsmiths UoL 🇬🇧, Kulturbahnhof Leisnig 🇩🇪, Leeds Uni 🇬🇧, Melanie Knight Arts Therapy 🇦🇺, Singapore International Foundation 🇸🇬, WabiSabiJetty 🇨🇦 and Appu’s Cuts 🇮🇳 for subscribing 🙏
Please forward this newsletter to a friend, and do reach out: kai@edgeandstory.com