Project Summary

A former thread-mill town weaves a new creative fabric - where people's ideas matter, where we engage our creativity together and where we co-create our community's common good. We are using inclusive dialogue processes to coordinate current citizen-centered projects and to include more voices.

About me

I have lived in Willimantic for three years. Sometimes, I feel like I informally serve the role of coordinator (or perhaps pollinator) as I interact with many of the pieces and people. This grant would allow me the opportunity to more deliberately make this happen on a regular basis, with intentional work to include more voices and new creators in the process. For 16 years, I've been working in the field of creativity, advocating for the importance of creative thinking and helping people unleash and harness more of their inherent creative abilities. In my work, I've repeatedly seen people discover through creativity what gives them purpose and meaning and then begin to translate those desires into concrete realities. As a result of this insight, I've been exploring how we might be more intentional about becoming better creative thinkers and doing more of what gives us a sense of purpose. This is engagement - doing what we love, what we are good at, what gives us meaning, what makes us happy and what uses our strengths. Tapping into this is what our project is all about. I am grateful to be collaborating with an intergenerational, multi-ethnic, multi-city, cross-organizational group of people who are passionate about opening up the frame of who participates in, contributes to and creates our community. These people include teachers, artists, cooperative developers, retirees, students, immigrants, social service organizers, local faculty, politicians, and business owners.