Creativity and Community Building

The disproportionate violence suffered by blacks at the hands of police demands new solutions. According to Rajiv Sethi, "In the [US], you're about two to three times more likely to face deadly force if you're Black than if you are white." (The Harvard Gazette) 

The Illumination Project has leveraged Polarity Thinking in Charleston, SC to help the community address deep issues between the Charleston Police Department and the community.  They have had success and want to scale their work. They need more facilitators, and help training them.  The Creative Education Foundation seeks to mobilize their talented deliberate creativity community to leverage Creative Problem Solving to address this social justice issue.

Like Polarity Thinking, Creative Problem Solving is a deliberate creativity process that fosters self-reflection and group awareness to facilitate new and collectively generated solutions to complex issues.  IP has the successful program and materials; CEF has hundreds of CPS and Polarity consultants in our community, and CEF and 67 years of experience running the Creative Problem Solving Institute, a 5-day creativity and leadership conference.  (We know how to train large groups in a short frame of time.) With the support of MIT Solve, we can scale IPs work.

Our solution is to facilitate whole communities together with police departments and their members in CPS and Polarity to help them address complex and seemingly unresolvable issues collaboratively and creatively.

Both CPS and Polarity tap individuals natural creative problem solving ability.  The processes deploy inquiry based processes that help participants step back from pain, emotion, and frustration -- while honoring personal experience -- to embark upon effective solution making.  Our current Black Lives Matter v. Blue Lives Matter polarity has fixated into a seemingly insurmountable "either/or" issue.  Polarity Thinking disrupts this feeling of immobility through group exploration of the highs and lows of each pole.  Coupled with CPS training, individuals cultivate new self-awareness and a creativity mindset that allows for deeper listening and creative solution-making.

We anticipate fewer incidences of police violence vs. black citizens, deeper trust of police departments, and other measurable community outcomes.

As a collaborative, we are in the prototype stage; we want to integrate CPS training with existing Polarity training at IP.  This requires program design with our expert Polarity and CPS consultants to ensure smooth integration that enhances the work being done by IP.  

We believe that CPS will provide a gentle introduction to the creativity mindset, which provokes self-reflection without shame, and presents the opportunity for understanding of others' reality without judgement.  We believe that cultivating creativity mindset via CPS first will help prepare individuals for painful work addressing issues of inequity and racism.  

We also want to be sure we attend to the deep pain suffered, particularly, by communities of color, and will work with DEI pros and psychologists to ensure that CPS and Polarity work is meeting the needs of those who are most vulnerable.