WORK WITH ME
Become artists of a living future
Discover connective practice + instruments of consciousness for making ‘social honey’
Experience the inner dimension of sustainability for deep and practical transformation. Connect the individual and the social, the self and the commons!
Mobilise radical, moral imagination… connect inner + outer work: enable new forms of perception, listening, deliberation and thinking-together.
Use connective practices and social-aesthetic strategies… to explore generative ways of living on one planet with different worldviews.
Develop connective intelligence… to shift from where we are to where we could be!
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“Living planning” is the alternative to dead planning, which gets stuck in formulating linear solutions to multidimensional problems and questions.
Living planning helps us follow the questions with new eyes and an insightful mind. It does not try to determine solutions with the same consciousness and attitudes that gave rise to the problems. It opens up pathways that follow the questions and needs. The plan emerges like an artwork. It evolves, shaped by insights along the path. The planning process becomes energising in itself.
Various connective strategies and formats are used to enable living planning. These include existing formats like ‘Earth Forum’, ‘Landing Strip for Souls’, and Working with Questions, and new formats developed to suit your needs.
CONTACT ME to find out more about the ‘living planning’ process, and how it could work in your organisation. -
I work with individuals and groups to shift from where you are to where you want to be, by developing capacities for deep and grounded insight that inform new creative action.
Through specially designed ‘connective imagination’ and ‘expanded aesthetic practices’, we uncover ‘guiding images’. We follow unheard questions. We explore the ‘thought of the heart’ and develop ‘new eyes for the world’.
These ways of perceiving the everyday anew give rise to connective insights, mobilise agency and lead to more interconnected actions.
The insights, distilled through this mentoring in connective practice, helps you become a maker of ‘social honey’ that energises, illuminates and nourishes processes at both individual and collective levels.
Contact me info@shelleysacks.comto schedule a call to explore ways I might work with you, your organisation, project, or community to contribute to enhanced creative engagement and a living future for all! -
An organisation, team or group is an organism. If not properly nourished and cared for it becomes weak, disconnected and distressed in its parts or the whole, and unable to fulfil its creative potential. The people in it get tired and weakened too.
Equally important is an organisation's relation to the wider context. If this is unconscious and unhealthy it leads to systemic disease.
I work with organisations, projects and groups - when they are forming and once they are running - to perceive the potential and spirit that gets veiled, overlooked and damaged, exploring opportunities for creative renewal, kindness and meaningful change.
I listen, co-create and develop inspiring connective processes and that take individuals and teams forward in relation to a deeper eco-social purpose.Using processes that awaken moral imagination enables both individuals and the organisation as a whole to work with a sense of agency, and explore how it can contribute to shaping a living future for all.
My approach to consultancy enables recovery of purpose and discovery of life giving forces. It is responsive and aesthetic. Transformations arise from individual and collective insights.
I work with the organisation, project or group as one would work on an artwork: to find the right methods for perceiving what needs to be enlivened, and for allowing new forms to emerge.
I do this work face-to face in the UK and Europe, occasionally further afield, including India and China. To limit international travel, where appropriate, some consultancy work can take place online.
I work primarily in English and sometimes in German, but have also worked happily with teams in other language contexts if co-facilitators speak English or German.
Contact me:
info@shelleysacks.com
We can schedule a call to discuss ways I might work with your organisation, project, or community. -
All connective practices link inner work and outer action and share a creative root methodology and approach that can be learned and scaled out.
They are not simply ‘tools’ with a purpose, but integrated theory-practice ‘instruments of consciousness’ that work on a mindset level and transform ways of perceiving, understanding and doing.You can participate in an intensive Connective Practice Training Program or train to become a multiplier of a specific connective practice. Currently these include:
Earth Forum
FRAMETALKS for schools
Journaling for Change
Field of Commitment
To be trained as a multiplier, you need to have either:
i. participated in one or more of these practices
ii. assisted on one of my projects, or
iii. taken part in an intensive program.
CONTACT ME to discuss these training possibilities.info@shelleysacks.com
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I share my questions, experiments and ways of working through keynote presentations, talks, and lecture-actions as well as through in-depth public conversation or panels.
See ‘INVITED SPEAKER’ CV section for the extensive keynotes, public exchanges, and lecture-performances I have presented in diverse contexts.
Please contact me to discuss the different options. -
I design and run workshops for citizens groups, educational and other networks, and organisations, that are interested in or committed to eco-social transformation and decolonizing the mind.
The workshops use aesthetic strategies and connective practices to uncover and engage with questions in profound, participatory and improvisational ways. This allows possibilities and ‘answers’ to emerge that cannot be predetermined.
Workshops are developed to suit the context and purpose. Duration can vary from a few hours to a day. They can take place at intervals over weeks or months.
CURRENT WORKSHOPS INCLUDE:
Drawing to Understand
Journaling for Change
3 Pots for the Future
Working with Questions
Landing Strip for SoulsCONTACT ME to schedule a call to discuss possibilities, duration & fees. info@shelleysacks.com
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I design pedagogic approaches and programs that enhance individual and collective agency. They develop interdisciplinary moral imagination and facilitate connective ways of engaging with the world. I have been doing this for many years.
Pedagogical approaches and forms of learning, knowing, researching and enquiry build capacity. But they are not neutral. They contain values and attitudes. They create lenses with which we see the world. They shape behaviours, and play a huge role in determining what can be known.
Such ways of knowing and learning inform curricula I’ve developed over the past in ‘art and healing’, interdisciplinary arts practice, and social sculpture-connective practice at all levels of tertiary education including graduate research methodologies. I have also brought these pedagogic insights into non-formal education and cooperative development programs in communities. These methodologies enable new organs of perception, moral imagination and more connective ways of being ‘artists’ in the world.My creative strategies approach and radical interdisciplinary and connective practice curricula - developed for over four decades in different countries and contexts - inform my advisory and consultancy work in program and curriculum development.
The design of these approaches has emerged through the practice.
My pedagogic practice has affinities with Robert Fillou’s understanding of ‘teaching and learning as a performing art’, Paulo Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Joseph Beuys’ declaration: ‘teaching is my greatest artwork’. -
My ‘instruments of consciousness’ take many forms. These include PARTICIPATORY ARENAS and ASSEMBLIES in public contexts that enable inspiring ways of imaginal-thinking together, developing new narratives, and making ‘social honey’.
Museums and other public institutions can loan participatory arenas like EXCHANGE VALUES and FRAMETALKS. They can also host EARTH FORUM processes and presentations of 7000(+) HUMANS.
Exchange Values on the Table creates an interface between small farmers and consumers around issues of fair trade, the future of work, and racial capitalism. It can be used as focal points for thematic enquiries - like Racial Capitalism - or curated as part of group exhibitions and other public events.
FRAMETALKS is a mobile instrument used to explore the 5 Realities -Nature, Human Being, Love, Freedom, Future in ourselves and in the world. It can be used as a stand alone installation-participatory arena, or as part of a curated exhibition. An adapted version of FRAMETALKS is available for use in schools.
EXCHANGE VALUES, EARTH FORUM and FRAMETALKS offer unique aesthetic processes for making social honey by enabling ethical imagination and forms of intuitive thinking-together. [See PRACTICE].
HANDBOOKS & TRAINING accompany these instruments, enabling others to facilitate these connective practices.
CONTACT ME to discuss using EXCHANGE VALUES and FRAMETALKS in museums & other public contexts. The FRAMETALKS process can facilitate climate processes, citizens youth movements and schools. -
I welcome conversations about collaborations.
I am currently working on several collaborative projects of different kinds.
I also curate enquiries involving my Connective Practice Approach and the field of social sculpture, or the 'inner dimension of sustainability'.
Other current foci are:
WORK
HUMANS and MACHINES
GUIDING IMAGES FOR A LIVING FUTURE
Please contact me to discuss possibilities.
WAYS OF WORKING TOGETHER
Getting to the habit level!
Work with the ‘invisible materials’ of social sculpture and connective practice: attitudes, values, mind-sets, habits of thought & imagination.
Explore this inner dimension of sustainability for a living future…enabling responsible imagination, ethical innovation and connective action.
Use unique ‘instruments of consciousness’ to develop ‘new eyes for the world’ and profound ways of ‘working with questions’.
Become agents of personal, social and systems change. Discover how difficulties become a resource!
Benefit from profound insights in these practices used by thousands of people over four decades
About connective practice
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Connective practice is for individuals, organisations, museums, think-tanks, decision-makers, global and local activists, multi-stakeholder groups, educational institutions, change networks, farmers, food chain explorers, local authorities, pupils, teachers, students, and people on the streets.
It takes many forms - using both existing ‘instruments of consciousness’ or new ones designed for the context.
Duration of engagement varies from one-day workshops to processes that last for months, sometimes years.
I work with intergenerational and specific age groups to explore shifts in consciousness and behaviour in relation to the ecological, psychological, social-spiritual crises of our times.I work with individuals, organisations, groups and global networks to enable co-creative processes that reinvigorate your work, your organisation, your community: its purpose, aims and objectives.
I work in museums and other institutional contexts with my mobile assemblies, ‘instruments of consciousness’ and connective practices for moral imagination, thinking-together and making social honey,
I work with curators, writers, researchers, local communities and global networks, in museums and other institutional contexts. sharing connective practices.
I contribute to platforms for many different publics: performing, writing, facilitating, speaking and exchanging. -
We are standing together on the edge of the old world. Both the human and more-than-human worlds are overshadowed by deep suffering.
Mind-sets, habits of thinking, attitudes and inherited behaviours can hold us back as individuals, as groups, as institutions. They can maintain forms and systems that are exploitative, destructive and unjust: that simply don’t work. They can hinder creative engagement and block connective forms from emerging.
To find new ways of living and being together on the planet - that do not destroy each other an all life forms, we need to explore existing knowledge of interconnected living and commit to finding new ways forward as well. This is not only about outer actions and ‘solutions’. It involves the inner culture of the human being, which includes connective imagination, inner ‘technologies’ and the capacity to recognise and take responsibility for our individual and collective mind-sets.
The inner dimension of sustainability is not well known. And is often overlooked. But as sustainability scientist E.F. Schumacher said - there can be no sustainable future without developing the inner culture of the human being. Discover the inner dimension of sustainability and ways of mobilising agency, connecting inner work and outer action, enabling new forms of listening and thinking-together, and of promoting connective intelligence.
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Coming soon
Mind-sets, habits of thinking, attitudes and behaviours can hold us back as individuals, groups, projects, institutions. They hinder creative engagement and insights, and block new forms from emerging.
All forms of connective practice share a commitment to social justice, decolonising the mind, connective imagination, and a change of heart. They reach to the habit level where fixed forms can be seen and let go, and new perceptions can arise.
GET IN TOUCH
enter a zone
of transformation
engage beyond the habit level
strengthen ethical imagination
develop ecological consciousness
