Just before the festive break the Inspiralba team had a creative session with Albatross Arts, a social enterprise based in Helensburgh who bring the creative arts in to practice for community benefit.
‘Albatross Arts is an organisation that breaks down access barriers to the arts. We support people by providing inclusive, high quality creative opportunities and taking on social challenges together in order to benefit communities.’ Find out more here: https://albatrossarts.org
We bring the whole team together for reflection and strategic planning about twice a year as well as our regular whole team check ins and our different teams working on reflection and planning on specific areas of work more regularly. We have used a collective approach to determine our values and principles and to help with our strategic and operational direction. I would say as a business/organisation we are comfortable with the importance of creativity. But we had never done anything as abstract as our workshop with Albatross Arts.
I have to admit I was a wee bit skeptical in the run up as we were mega busy and a staff day of time was quite precious. When you are stretched and juggling commitments and the pressures of meeting needs and obligations it can be a challenging place to be and you can forget the importance and value to stop for a breath, for reflection and inspiration to keep you going or re inflate your tires for the ongoing journey across difficult terrain. But I am so glad I did and we did as a team (thanks Jo – who as an engineer in a previous life has always been the one that said she wasn’t creative but it was Jo who pushed for us to engage Albatross having been inspired by providing support to them via Just Enterprise. I’m so glad she did as it was so worth it.
Albatross Arts did a lot of preparation using our vision, values and principles as the focus of the creative session we would do together:
At Inspiralba we take creative approaches, working in partnership, to enable positive social and environmental impact, incorporating fairness & equality and the appreciation of people and place. With a focus on wider well-being, we value integrity and honesty to deliver quality services that support individual, organisational, community opportunities and resilience.
Alex had also gathered in from each of our team, their personal values to see how these aligned and contributed to the team values. But also using visual representation of the values base which would inspire the colours for our collective work.
The workshop started by warming us up recognising how it can be a real barrier for folks to feel comfortable with ‘art’ lots of folk lack confidence or feel their creativity might be judged. Albatross completely put us all at ease and assisted us to work creatively together using bold expressive art and high quality materials.
The resulting pieces, three giant canvasses of abstract visualisation of our values distilled down to the themes of:
Opportunity, equality and resilience.
It was a phenomenal experience and also great fun. The social impact report has also given us some real good for thought on how we can present some of our evaluation and social impact reporting.
The three canvasses really brighten up our office and are a real focal point, which also remind us of our values and principles but in a more creative way.
I will definitely be reaching out to Alex and Albatross Arts again for some creative inspiration and support on some of our social impact measurement work. I would thoroughly reccomend stepping outside the comfort zone and working with Albatross for your organisation or business to reflect and build creative connection across your team and your work. It has definitely added something positive to our team and informed our ongoing work with individuals and communities to overcome challenges and barriers to turn ideas and aspirations to reach their full potential.
I reckon Albatross did that for us too.
Read the full impact report below.
