Creative Growth Resource Pack
Mapping Your Creative Growth: Toolkit
Creative and cultural work grows from the development, in practice, of multiple relationships and exchanges with a wider range of people, things, organisations, places and challenges. CHARTS are delighted to provide downloadable mapping templates based on Dr Michael Pierre Johnson’s Creative Growth Model. These same templates were used to map and support over 32 CHARTS members, and three place making projects, as part of the Microcluster Networks in Argyll and Isles research partnership between CHARTS and The Glasgow School of Art’s Innovation School. To learn more about this model, how it was used, what it captured and how members and places benefitted from working with it, we recommend reading the project report.
This toolkit provides you with templates and prompt questions to visually map the narrative of your creative and cultural work, what growth can mean through the potential network of people and things you can engage, and helps you envision your development journey as a visual action plan. To help you use and benefit from these maps we have prepared a downable toolkit, which includes downloadable blank templates and visual reference maps with prompt questions to guide you in mapping your own creative and cultural ‘eco-system’. While each map can be completed on their own, a top tip can be to co-produce your maps with a colleague or mentor who can help you drill down and write clear, accurate responses.
Narrative Mapping
This exercise can provide a powerful reflection on your identity and your story, based on your personal motivations, assets and contexts where you want to make a difference. We recommend starting with this template, as it can help to clarify strengths and weaknesses for the development challenges you want to set yourself.
Network Mapping
This exercise allows you to open up the possibilities for your development, identifying gaps in your networks and the options to be pursued. We recommend taking time to identify a clear and focused development challenge at the beginning of this activity, and take time to explore the boundaries of your (and others’) knowledge of who else and what else could contribute to your development.
Journey Mapping
This exercise can provide a tangible resource for establishing ambitious goals and processes that feel clear, balanced and realisable. We recommend doing this activity last of all, taking time to identify a rich, optimistic and rich vision that builds on the previous maps and pushes what difference your growth would make, not just for you and your practice, but for the communities and cultural contexts you want to impact.
“The Creative Growth Model, and these mapping templates, seek to reframe (and reclaim) notions of growth and value that can better represent what drives creative and cultural work relationally and holistically. The goal is for this way of thinking to enable the development and cultivation of more resilient and thriving regional ecologies of culture, heritage and arts.” – Dr Michael Pierre Johnson, Creative Economy Leadership Fellow at the Innovation School, The Glasgow School of Art.
Creative Growth Resource Pack
CHARTS statement
“The Microcluster Networks in Argyll and Isles research collaboration achieved an inter-regional dialogue across CHARTS membership around pivotal themes, which included building relationships between members resident on mainland and islands. New burgeoning relationships were brokered regionally, nationally and internationally through this research and development process. CHARTS has holistically supported its membership and developed ways to adapt to the challenges thrown at us by this pandemic, but it is clear we all need to continue to adapt. The articles, mapping tools and resources presented in this package, both respond to and build on our members’ contributions, dialogues and motivations for future development.
CHARTS is a member-guided organisation and so we share this package as an appeal and as further support to members to take on and meet new challenges. Using these resources, CHARTS platforms, and by further building relationships across the membership, we aim to profile, promote and develop new work and further the ongoing potential for co-designed opportunities and collaborations that continue to act to celebrate our region’s rich culture, arts and heritage.” - Kathleen O’Neill, Director
If you would like to get in touch for future co-design of project ideas for funding, please contact us - info@chartsargyllandisles.org