Everyone is creative
Liese Lattrez, host of the Brussels chapter of the global CreativeMornings breakfast talk series, wants to inspire the Brussels creative community
For Liese Lattrez, everyone is creative. And she wants to bring out this creativity in others by inspiring them on Friday mornings once a month. Liese is the host of CreativeMornings Brussels, the local chapter of the free, global monthly breakfast series for the creative community. CreativeMornings in Brussels has been going strong for four years now having been started first by innovation researcher Carmen Vintilescu and recently taken over by Liese.
“Everyone is creative. Everyone is welcome”
CreativeMornings is an event series organised by city chapters taking place one Friday morning every month in 184 chapters in 65 countries. It was started in New York City in 2008 out of a desire for an ongoing, accessible event for New York’s creative community. Today, the CreativeMornings manifesto states: “Everyone is creative. A creative life requires bravery and action, honesty and hard work. We are here to support you, celebrate with you, and encourage you to make the things you love. (…) Everyone is welcome.” Liese stresses in her explanation of what CreativeMornings wants to achieve that it is about organising “something that is accessible to everyone” — which is why the events are free — and explains how she as the team in Brussels doesn’t “focus on high profile speakers but instead we focus on our network and want to build a community”. The theme for each month is the same across all global chapters and decided by a different city each month. Hosting interesting speakers, Liese says, is not about giving a platform to high profile speakers that are already roaming the speaking circuit but instead finding hidden gems that can inspire both intellectually and emotionally. And the audience appears inspired, as the majority of the up to 90 attendees each month are returning listeners who come to meet over coffee and breakfast, get inspired and network.
“Everyone is creative. A creative life requires bravery and action, honesty and hard work. We are here to support you, celebrate with you, and encourage you to make the things you love. (…) Everyone is welcome.”
For Liese herself, who organises the events in her spare time, it is more fun than work. Whilst she acknowledges that it’s not always easy to keep up with the standard of engaging speakers that Brussels showcases, she looks forward to each event. “It’s the talking to people at events that motivates me. The atmosphere is great and everyone is very open. I like the very diverse mix who attend our events between young creatives, entrepreneurs and those that are especially interested in a speaker — every speaker brings their own crowd too, which is great.”
The format for each event is straightforward: attendees are invited to network over a welcoming and free breakfast, then the 30 minute talk takes places followed by time for questions and answers. Liese says that following each talk, many attendees stick around keeping up the conversation beyond the 90 minutes that are allocated for each event.
Having restarted in February after a short break during the handover to her and some time for reflection and introspection, the team kicked off the new year with an exceptional two talks instead of one on creativity. One of the presenters, Luis Vanhaverbeke, artist in residence at Beursschouwburg, delivered a performance on creativity rather than a talk and Liese muses that this was something new and will be an innovation that she will likely bring to her future events too. She would also like to try out some ideas that other chapters are already doing, like organising trips to museums or art fairs or any trip that the community would like to see — which is “coming back to the art and creative part of CreativeMornings”.
Spider in the web of the creative community
With Liese works a team of five volunteers who help her organise the logistics of the event as well as find speakers. The local partners that support the series including the arts venue Beursschouwburg who are hosting the events are also actively involved in putting together the programme through making suggestions, and coffee sponsor Apex Coffee. Liese, who is a freelance videographer and started out volunteering for CreativeMornings contributing her skills, compares herself as the spider in the web. She gets to meet a varied group of people when working with partners, speakers and volunteers. Speakers, whilst not paid, benefit from the exposure, Liese tells, including a recording of every talk that is shown freely online for the community and coaching through Toastmasters Brussels before their event.
On her immediate agenda are the search for further partners or sponsors saying “I want to broaden our network of partners and am happy to have an open conversation about possible collaborations with anyone” as well as finding one or two helping hands in the mornings of each event to help out on an ad-hoc basis. The CreativeMornings wants to get together with partners, to make them part of the team and the community in order to help keep the event free and to make the events better by strengthening the community and providing them with more tools.
Upcoming event on courage
Following the first event of the year on curiosity, the next one will be on courage on Friday 16 March. The Brussels team interpreted the global theme in a local yet global way bringing in Adriana Costa Santos and Bert Van Vossole who the driving powers behind a Facebook group that now offers a place to sleep to over 500 refugees in transit in Brussels every night.
Learn more about CreativeMornings: http://www.creativemornings.com/bru
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