Be a creativity pioneer. Change the world | Adama Sanneh

How can we create a society in which creativity is inevitable and becomes really the force through which we build our collective future? The question that we need to ask ourselves is really, can creativity change the world? (loud clack) I was not expecting that. We all live the same problems, and now the world is in the highest peak of interconnectedness, but it's really how can we dialogue together so that we can bring about change. In the same way that we have NGOs, businesses, and social entrepreneurs, we do believe that Creativity Pioneers is a completely new cluster. So ultimately, the Creativity Pioneers Fund is an effort to really try to build an ecosystem around the Creativity Pioneers.

Escuela de Teatro Musical de Petare works in Petare, one of the biggest, most dangerous, and vulnerable slums in the world, providing artistic education for children and youth so they can themselves become the creators of significant social change in the community.

"Moon Girls" is an African graphic novel series that follows the adventures of four queer woman superheroes to talk about homophobia, corruption, patriarchy, rape culture, and environmental destruction.

Yeah, I'm the co-founder of the organization, Jailtime Records. We built the first-ever recording studio in the prison in Africa. People are really sharing a lot of personal stories with me through the mic.

In a way or another, my entire life was about finding ways to look and reconsider the current framework. I worked in a refugee camp. I worked in education, agriculture, and food security. There was something, though, that didn't click fully with me in the overall approach of international development. What I learned is that creativity can really be at the center of a different way of looking at the world. We can look at the example of South Africa and how South Africa came out from the struggle.

A freedom struggle by its nature is profoundly creative. It's transforming society, imagination, a sense of who you are, but sometimes the mechanisms to achieve liberation become very narrow, stilted, and formulaic.

So in this sense, really, creativity, you know, it is not something that is just an extra; it is the fundamental engine, you know, that can move the world forward.

I think the conventional interventions underestimate the power of creativity. It allows people to inhabit other people's shoes.

It allows a space for magic.

I came pretty much at the end of the road of what I could do with my traditional toolbox, and that's when I encountered colleagues at the Moleskine Foundation who offered me a very different viewpoint on how, you know, arts and cultures could be ways to show, you know, the potential of humanity, the potential of creativity, the potential of imagination.

Historically, Creativity Pioneers, creative change-makers have been overlooked and have been underfunded. They somehow fall at the margin of social change.

We need to really broaden out our sense of creativity away from this notion of it being cute and a nice to have to turn it into something extremely concrete and very practical.

Creativity provides the people that we are working with, with a platform, with a voice in society.

In questioning the power, questioning the government, and questioning the representatives.

I discover music as an instrument of resistance.

People lose their lives; people lose their homes. People lose meaning, quality of life. Creative solutions give us a space for another type of thinking.

Creativity Pioneers are change-makers that are able to combine the heart and the mind. They're able to combine poetry with a pragmatic approach to social change. They are a glocal organization, local and global at the same time, but it's about their approach, their posture, their attitude. These are change-makers that are able to reconcile all these apparent contradictions, and to do that, they have the first and main feature that is the courage to believe in their approach.

And there's just like a spark that is there and it's alive. They will never be willing to let it fade.

The lens through which society has been built has limited the vision, the understanding of what creativity can bring.

One thing I have learned, and I am actively sort of pursuing in the practice, is how we can actually bring creativity, arts, and culture to the heart of policymaking. Not just to inform, you know, different policies, but actually to be different policies.

I don't see democracy as the thing out there and art and culture there. They're so integrated, interrelated. The democracy is enriched. It's strengthened; it's given vitality through the infusion of art.

We cannot tackle the system as a whole. While if we go to the local, we can move from theory to the practice because that is the seed to bring about change at a global level. It's about showing the world that there is a movement that is a group of change-makers that are really bringing about change in a completely different way, can instill that spark, that collective spark, that can really change the way we can build our collective future.

And I hope it can be something that's replicated because we have a lot of issues to fix, guys. We need to accelerate the process as much as we can.

Let's do this.