Cleo Barnett
Cleo Barnett
Executive Director @ Amplifier
“We’re taking all the tragedy that’s happening in our world, all the destruction and hate, and transforming it into something beautiful. We’re designing compasses that are pointing towards the future.”
Action Prompts
// SELF REFLECTION
1. Stand up, shake out your limbs, stomp your feet & take some deep breaths. Reach out your arms side to side and collect in all your disparate energy back into your heart center. Now take some more deep breaths to check in with what you’re feeling and where you feel it in your body.
2. Get a piece of paper and some pens as you settle back at your desk.
3. Create 2 sections on your page: Hopes & Dreams | Fears & Concerns
4. Draw images, symbols, shapes, and words that capture your feelings in each section.
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// TEAM EXPLORATION
Dedicate 60 minutes to create an artful collage with your team using a virtual whiteboard tool like Miro.
1. Begin by doing the embodiment exercise (step 1) together, then give everyone 5-10 minutes to do the creative self reflection (steps 2-3) outlined above.
2. Now, each person please find an image that reflects your feeling(s) and place it onto the whiteboard.
3. Witness a piece of artwork materialize that represents your collective feelings.
4. Open dialogue:
-Each person is invited to share about the images you chose and what it represents to you.
-What feelings do you sense are emerging from the whole collage?
-What was it like to engage in this process as a team?
5. Thank each other. Being seen & heard in our truth is inherently valuable, it doesn't alway have to translate into an action plan, unless you want it to .
Resources
Download and print Amplifier art from home to share with your community.
The new Amplifier AR App transforms the analog 2-D posters, stickers, and murals into art that literally comes to life.
Podcast: Using Art to Heal with Rukmini Poddar
LISTEN HERE
Our interview with Cleo Barnett (she/her), Executive Director of Amplifier, is a vibrant wake-up call for us to remember that our innate creativity holds the key to navigating tumultuous times.
Amplifier is a non-profit design lab who builds media experiences to amplify the most important social movements of our time.
Each year, they do a dozen or so campaigns with movements, and 1-3 rapid response campaigns where they bring together coalitions of artists, educators and movement leaders to help them respond to current events.
One of the recent rapid responses they launched is an education initiative, where they send free artwork and teaching tools to educators across the country. They’re in the process of defining their strategy for 2021, which will be influenced quite heavily by the election.
Artful protest brings beauty to dissent. Art allows us to express that which we may not be consciously aware of yet. Creative flow is an embodied and neurological process that is baked into our evolutionary DNA.
Want to cultivate an entrepreneurial mindset in your organization? Heed Cleo’s words around creative expression and collective strategy development. It's the key to unlocking human potential at work.
Are you ready to move through this evolutionary portal at which we collectively stand today? Let’s dream up what comes next, together.
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The Nature of the Amplifier Org
We’re lucky in that we’re an artist founded and artist run organization. Adapting, creative problem solving, following our intuition, and building structures that work for our creativity is at the core of our organization.
More and more I see our work as alchemy. We’re taking all the tragedy that's happening in our world, all the destruction and hate, and transforming it into something beautiful. We’re designing compasses that are pointing towards the future.
Creative Response at the Heart of Their System
Our team has been designing all of the systems of our organization from the ground up. From our customer relationship management tools, to the way we do our budgeting and bookkeeping, and HR. Everything has been designed by us. We've really taken our time to make sure that those systems work for us, so we're now at a place of being able to reap the fruits of that labor, and build upon them.
When COVID hit, we had our systems in place to respond. We launched a rapid response campaign in three days, which speaks to the nimbleness and the creative energy of our team.
The Moment to Go Global
With our first ever global open call for artists, there were three prompts. One of them was messages for public health and safety. The second one was messages for wellbeing. The third was visions for the future.
We had over 10,500 submissions from over 90 countries around the world in three weeks, and we raised over $100,000, so we were able to pay artists with rapid response grants.
That's something that we continue to do when there's these moments that are rife with fear and panic, stemming from colonization. Given the impacts now happening around the world, we're able to create channels for people to participate, engage and add their creative energy.
We always want to respond to our environment. It’s rapidly changing and will impact where we focus our efforts. Today we've been focused in the United States, but this year we're definitely seeing a calling for us to be more global in scope. How can we work together globally to respond to these crises that we're seeing happen all over the world as a result of colonization?
Dreaming the Dream for a New Way
Now that I'm Executive Director in this time of turmoil, we're just busier than ever. As an organization, it's really important for us to take time to meet as a team and dream the dream. What does the world need? How do we want to organize the system and structure the organization to ensure that we're breaking through the hamster wheel and going in a direction that will transform the world?
To me it's strategic. If we don't create space to dream, we're just going to keep doing what we're doing and what we're doing is clearly not working and only serves a very small percentage. I would argue it doesn't even serve them.
Author adreienne maree brown says, back in the day, people couldn't see past kings and queens. There's definitely a place beyond capitalism, we just have to take some time to envision it. But obviously we also have to survive and meet the needs of the day to day. It’s finding that balance.
Compassion for Different Lived Experiences
I'm seeing that for our team, creating that space to nurture the passion of the individuals and realizing any issues that come up with team members are reflective of the systems in the world (like racism, sexism). I understand that we're all quite hurt people. When issues do arise in a team environment, it's important to see each other as humans that are going through these real struggles, and make sure to create space for healing within the workplace. That’s so foundational to building trust, and growing to be able to do this work together.
At work, in the middle of a pandemic, we’re here to support tens of thousands of artists around the world and create these messages for public health and safety. How do we also make sure that we're creating space for our own healing? That's part of the pause in the strategic planning, making sure we’re creating that space for reflection ongoingly within the work structure.
Toxic Hierarchies are Harmful for Everyone, Even at the Top
The more I dig into this work, the more I'm seeing that we've created these false hierarchies that are now crumbling all around us. This view that some people are better than others, that we can take and use the natural environment limitlessly is clearly false, and destructive. It not only threatens so many people's lives and so many animals lives, but also threatens our natural environment.
I also think it's very destructive for the white male hierarchy at the top. It looks like they're riddled with stress and disconnected. Disconnected from their own spirit, disconnected from the environment, disconnected from other humans. It doesn't look very joyful.
Team Breakthroughs and Cohesion
How can we have excellence, and create the most powerful work we can possibly create in the world, while also being very aware where white supremacy shows up in perfectionism, tight deadlines, not taking pauses, not caring for yourself, and overworking?
It’s all those things, and it’s unspoken. It's habits, it's expectations that you put on yourself as a leader, and what that does for the rest of your team. We’re all different, and we all have different paces that are healthy for us as people. The level of production that I expect out of myself needs to be different than what I expect from other people. We all have different capacities. We all have different personal lives. I’m single with no children. I have a different availability in my day than the founder of Amplifier who has a wife and children.
You have to see the whole person and bring an awareness of their health into consideration when you're planning the structures of your organization. It’s a strength when they bring their perspective to the organization, and weave that into the design of how your team works together.
I want to create an environment where we can be vulnerable with one another. If something upsets someone, we can talk about it, because we have a lot of love for each other as humans, outside of the workspace. We're all at different stages of our career, but we know we all have value and we all have something to teach.
I adore every single person on our team. We spend so much of our time working together so hard. I’m trying to be as transparent as possible around strategy and how strategy is formed, and creating space for every single person in the team to feed into that strategy. We’re not perfect. We're still working with the non-profit structure, so there is hierarchy, but we’re making sure that hierarchy doesn’t go unchallenged, that it has checks and balances and that we’re all held accountable.
Measuring Shifts in Community Consciousness
We’ve distributed tens of millions of pieces of artwork in the public space, knowing that what people see or don't see really matters. In order to change public policy, you first have to shift the consciousness of the people. So we're really invested in reclaiming public space, including classrooms. It’s been really challenging to measure that!
During and after every campaign, we set goals, including reaching our audience and an action we want our audience to take. We do those measurements for every campaign, with every partner organization, and every artist that we work with.
We're also measuring the way we connect with our communities. One really incredible metric that we got this year was that 70% of educators who took our survey that are part of our network reported that bullying decreased in the classroom after our artwork was placed on their walls.
We got a $300,000 grant that allowed us to launch the “We The People” campaign, and we turned that into $1.3 million in eight days on Kickstarter. We had over a million downloads of the artwork in every country around the world in five days. The metrics told the story of mobilizing millions of people around the world. We're shifting hearts and minds.
The goal is for everyone to have access to housing, clean water, and healthy food. Being able to access an unbiased education that allows people to tap into what they're passionate about, and how they want to uniquely contribute to society. I don't know if we're going to get there in our lifetimes. We're working towards basic fundamental human rights for all people.
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Use this collection of 28 self reflection prompts and team activities. Each one is designed to support you in exploring empathy, and building a work culture in alignment with your values and vision.