FIELD BUILDING:
EVIDENCE & TRAINING TO ADVANCE ARTS-BASED COHESION
Through rigorous evaluation and field testing, ASC builds evidence showing how arts-based approaches support and accelerate innovative efforts toward social cohesion, group resilience, and ways out of intractable conflict.
ASC is developing a pedagogy to train more artists in principles and strategies to craft conditions for people to connect and collaborate across lines of difference.
In progress: Cohesion residency and process evaluation Autumn 2025 (Incevia Policy Partners) & Spring 2026 (TogetherUP Institute)
Additional Leadership Clinics for Entrepreneurship, Creative & Artistic Teams
Enhancing Leadership By Reframing Risk
Leading teams through volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity requires building psychological safety: a culture of belonging, learning and iteration in which members feel safe to candidly express diverse ideas, concerns, questions, and admit to mistakes. Essential to such cultures is clearly differentiating between types of risks and reasons for undesirable outcomes.
This experiential workshop begins by drawing on artistic processes, together with purposeful movement and group improvisation, to enable participants to clearly identify risks on a continuum: From those that test ideas, expand knowledge and are to be celebrated as agents of innovation even when they lead to unwanted results, to risks that harm collective efforts, often when an individual elevates themselves above the group, such in situations where a person decides not to carry their weight in a collective project.
We then examine the stories we tell ourselves about reasons for failure, with emphasis on probing the conditions underlying what has occurred — even when “blameworthy” — in order to guide team efforts with greater humanity, towards deepened understanding of all members’ needs and experiences.
“While virtually every manager will tell you how important it is to foster belonging, far fewer are aware of the threats to belonging that shape the daily experience at their very own workplace. ”
Listening Through The Music
Team-Building Through Musical Improvisation
Exciting, quickly learned movement and music improv games give powerful tools to working with others: the abilities to tune in, connect, and respond spontaneously and meaningfully to one another. These games reset ordinary power dynamics, setting up cooperative models where every voice matters.
Geared for facilitators, general classroom teachers and music educators, this experiential workshop builds team work and leadership through games in music and movement improvisation.
Initially created for mediation organizations like Seeds of Peace, this workshop has been adapted for classrooms, choirs, theatrical casts and professional work environments.
No previous musical or movement experience required. Participants should come ready to move, play and get curious.
