My latest project is a bit different. It has taken me into new territory well outside of my comfort zone. In 2019 I committed to Doctoral research at QUT. I wanted to unpack my 30 years professional experience and turn it into a resource, or toolkit, to help emerging cultural producers in the intermediation and brokerage of cross sector partnerships.
Over the years my trade mark 3C projects have contributed to community wellbeing throughout Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa, employed scores of creative professionals and generated several million dollars in corporate investment and government funding. The Doctoral process gave me time to reflect on that and the professional methodology that I developed around it.
My research explored the role of the intermediary in bringing creativity to bear on community engagement and corporate social investment. With two case study projects (see above) I demonstrated how creative brokerage can be developed as a practice and how this can help the arts and community sectors move beyond those modernist stereotypes that position artists as supplicants for benefaction, into more empowered relations with business and communities.