I am in a career transition moment and have recently been considering my own personal values and how they affect my personal mission and vision. It’s important to me to be self aware and crystal clear about how my values influence my decisions, actions, and behaviour — personally and professionally — before I make any decisions about my next career move.
Although I will always value things like curiosity, creativity, and innovation, when I pushed myself to really dig deep into what truly informed my essence it was the following three that revealed themselves to be at the core:
RELATIONSHIPS
Being connected to others, belonging to a community where you feel seen and accepted, flaws and all, and knowing that you can trust and count on others to be there for you. …
You know those feelings of minor panic when you feel like if you don’t do something, things will go wrong? Yay, well, three days before the 2018 civic elections in Vancouver, I really felt like I was being dishonest if I didn’t say something, so I sent this message to everyone local in my contacts database.
Hello friend,
I hope this message finds you happy, healthy, and hopeful. If we’ve not spoken for a while perhaps this email will reconnect us so we can catch up! I am emailing you about the civic election in Vancouver — which I confess is stressing me out. Don’t worry, I’m not emailing you to promote a candidate or political party — and I’m not running (can you imagine? …
On October 14th, Vancouver will hold its first by-election in a quarter-century to fill an empty city council seat. In conversations with members of the local creative community, a few issues kept coming up, so I decided to put those questions to the candidates themselves—and surprisingly they all responded! These are by no means all the important issues, but a few worth considering as we consider who we’d like to represent us at City Hall. Below are all nine candidates’ responses in their own, unedited words offered without comment for your consideration.
Gary Lee: I think the creative economy is essential to Vancouver’s identity and is one of the things that makes this city amazing. We have a wealth of talented individuals in this city that need to be able to show the world what we are all about. The creative economy is everything from the VSO to a street busker to a public disco. I love being able to walk down Commercial or Main St. or downtown and stumble upon some kind of performance. I would work with the other councilors to support the arts in the city. I think events like the Mural fest have been fantastic and I would absolutely support more events like it were I a councilor. …
I had an emotional and gratifying start to my day recently thanks to my new friend Rob, who told me how the transformation of a downtown Vancouver alley has improved his life on the streets in a meaningful way.
On my walks to work lately I have a new habit of cutting through “Alley-Oop” laneway just south of West Hastings between Seymour and Granville to see what is happening in the early hours of the day. This morning was a particularly cold and wet winter day and I didn’t expect to see much action in this unusual downtown alley.
Alley-Oop is the first of three urban laneways being reimagined as activated public spaces as part of the #MoreAwesomeNow initiative, a partnership between the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association and my firm HCMA Architecture + Design. A public space activation project like this is a good example of how we use our TILT Curiosity Labs platform to search for opportunities to step outside traditional architectural and client work and explore creativity, art, design, and community service in search of unexpected moments of inspiration, learning, and positive social impact. …
Last night I found myself lying in bed, unable to sleep. Maybe it was just the heat, but my mind kept obsessing over how hard my team has been working on our latest HCMA/TILT Curiosity Labs project, a community impact initiative to create an interactive sound and light installation called “FIELD” as the public art component of the upcoming laneway transformation in Ackery’s Alley in downtown Vancouver. We’re running our first ever Kickstarter campaign to help pay for this public art, which has been a costly and time consuming effort to say the least. …
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