Communities Create

The Communities Create Initiative empowers Canadians to express themselves using creativity, to build their skills, and find human connection during this unprecedented time. Participants were invited to engage in a series of free online workshops sponsored by the Canadian creative community, to help them convey how they are feeling through a variety of different mediums, and then share their work online.

Program Highlights

Communities Create produced over 20 creative skills workshops with leaders, cultural organizations, and academic institutions across Canada to encourage participants to create expressions about how they are feeling during the pandemic. This initiative was an opportunity for Canadians of all ages to connect with industry experts, each other, and creativity. We were joined by CBC Arts to stream the workshops and reach as many Canadians as possible.

Each week, collaborator organizations hosted live, free, online participatory creative workshops running the gamut of creativity – photography, comedy, design, podcasts, mask-making, music, web series production and much more – all with the tools and equipment people have access to, at home. The campaign provided financial support to over 20 members of the creative community who are in need, through micro grants for independent artists who hosted the workshops.

“We are facing unprecedented changes, fears, disconnection, and new ways of being,” says Ramona Pringle, director of the Innovation Studio. “With physical distancing measures in effect, an increasing state of anxiety and restlessness, and the uncertainty of what the next few weeks and months will look like, there is a greater need for us to connect and cultivate a deeper sense of community. We need creativity now more than ever.”