Welcome to jeffbarnum.com, where I share my work as an artist and social entrepreneur. This section is about the work I do with Reos Partners, a global organization I co-founded in 2007. Reos has six offices in five countries, and we organize, design, and facilitate multi-stakeholder creative processes with business, government, and civil society organizations.
Reos works around the world on some of humanity's most pressing challenges - supporting peaceful exchange in conflict areas, protecting vulnerable children, charting the futures of regions. In this work, I’ve learned, people really want the same thing: peaceful, prosperous, harmonious societies. But very few know how to create one.
My focus in this work is "social creativity" - creativity applied to social challenges and opportunities. Some artists make work about social change, or do art projects with the public. My particular "artistic" focus is creating new societies from within existing ones.
Art is the concentrated form of creativity: the human ability to create new meaning, relationships, ideas, and culture. As such, the discipilnes and capacities in art are readily translated to social change efforts that seek to create new societies. The basic elements of a creative approach to social change are:
understanding the creative process
establishing the conditions for creativity
practicing the relevant disciplines and capacities
being both open-ended and outcome driven
Please explore the projects above and the other sections of this site to learn more about my work.
my social services
• Process Design & Facilitation • Speaking & Teaching • Integration of theory & practice • Creativity & its Social Applications • Consultation
