How Emer Beamer creates space with children’s creativity
Happyplaces Stories (video)
Connections
I guess I have an interesting relationship to space because I’ve lived in a lot of different countries. Like already when I was 17 I went to San Francisco. I lived there for five months and worked there. And when I was 18, 19 I went to London and then when I was 20 I moved to Amsterdam. We used to joke that, I friend of mine, and I used to count the number of countries that we cleaned toilets in. Because that was the kind of jobs, you did as a student. And how many continents have you cleaned toilets in, because some friends had been to Australia. So they had like America, Australia, Europe. So, yes, I do see the world as my oyster.
I could go to any place. I have been to Bangladesh, Mexico, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Kenia, South Africa, Ghana… and I’ve worked in all those places. Somehow I am able to create spaces to connect with people in all these different contexts. And I think it is actually about the connection with people. The space is important, the connection you are able to make with people in those spaces is much more important.
Overcome challenges
I studied economics in Dublin at the University. And the reason I did that was to find out if I could understand why there is monetary inequality in the world. Why are some people poor and why are some people rich? And that unfairness, I wanted to understand the systems behind it. And to be honest, I totally didn’t learn what was behind that by studying economics. Later, in Amsterdam, I studied at the Rietveld and studied design which was the kind of education I had been looking for, that type of learning. Being asked to connect your head and your heart to a question and to serve an answer in any media you like. Could be verbal, could be a performance or text or an image. And then as a designer, I began to design educational processes all over the world for young people in challenging circumstances. And that could be a cd, or an e-learning program or a mobile game or a board game or a peace campaign. Many different forms. But in essence, it was always about connecting to young people’s motivation. And giving them skills, so that they could overcome the challenging situations they were in. It has been absolutely amazing to work with so many different young people and their caretakers and their ministers, Education and Health, and teachers, trying to orchestrate these systems that would help young people.
The spaces that we worked in were often quite almost tedious. A bit meagre on the esthetics. So it was all the more challenging to us to create the framework or the personal connection that overcame almost the physical environment we were in. In pretty much all the countries I have been to there was a two to three months preparatory phase where we were working out who needed to be at this workshop. It would be a co-creation workshop of two or three, maybe even four days as specific people were invited, to be interdisciplinary, different ages, different functions. There would also, pretty always beforehand a budget be allocated actually to implement what we would come up with together. And it was up to us, a colleague and me from Butterfly Works, to facilitate the process that people collaboratively decided what the project would become. From their expertise. Being a student, being a teacher or programmer, being a photographer.
Changing the atmosphere
We always started such a workshop with, what we call ‘warm-ups’ or ‘ice-breakers’. These are ways of kind of stating ‘we are all equal here’, ‘we’re going to do something different’, ‘it’s a playful space’ and ‘it’s okay to laugh, and to move’. Often warm-ups were kind of silly or simple, taking 20 minutes or half an hour to do such things completely changes the atmosphere. I have done this with men and women, 12-year old boys and girls in Afghanistan, people who arrived in burkas… You got a totally different atmosphere, and it laid the basis for these people to discuss issues that girls might have getting to school, or what stops people taking part in their education, and how can we alleviate these problems together. You know, everybody has a playful child inside them, and give that space, that person shows themselves. There is also an axis of hierarchy. Like the more hierarchical the society, in general, the harder to get the community to co-create a solution. Because the minute a hierarchically higher person is in a group, they will dominate the outcome. In such a situation it is all the more important to emphasise the equalness of what people are making. Because we’re asking them to step into a creative space, a space where the outcome is unknown, in a way that is also what makes everybody equal. Because the child doesn’t know what is coming out. But neither does the Ministry of Education expert. It is a new space for everybody.
I don’t know. Somehow we manage with some kind of unassuming nature or welcoming nature to get people through this flow and to encourage them. And of course we have all kinds of tools pre-prepared, you know, sheets and maps, stickers, and we document it and present it back to them. So they get in the flow of: ‘Oh, we really are making something together.’ And they feel like they are being heard and that their statements matter.
Legacy
Well, I heard somebody say that all people have three things in common of what they’re doing here on the planet. And they are legacy, connection and freedom. So, unlike most people, who potentially wait until their fifties or something, to work on their legacy, I felt that I already had achieved my legacy at 30. Because through the co-founding of Nairobits in the Nairobi slums for the young people there to escape poverty by getting a creative web and design training, they get jobs. That was 13 years ago. And just last week one of the graduates won a competition for developing an app and won USD 12,000 in a national competition. So I feel like I already have given back something huge to the world that is still continuing. So I felt free to move on to a new phase of my life after having done some really good work. I’m really proud of what I have achieved and what it has enabled to mean to other people. And I needed to check in with myself: am I connecting sufficiently to what I find beautiful? So much I was creating what the world might need, and I was using my skills in a good way, it wasn’t sufficiently in connection anymore with what I wanted to work on. So I spent quite a few months on ‘what is that then.’ I see a lot of other people doing that. It is like people used to think: ‘Oh, I’m supposed to find out what I wanna be’ and then you will be that for 50 years or so and take a pension. What I see now is, it is more like you spend 10 or 12 years in one version of you and then you move on, be another version of you. You change your role. And the transition phase is search, and it’s not obvious. It could be many different forms and it could be many different theme’s.
In my search, to pin that down, I came to a number of theme’s that had to be. But the key moment was, a friend of mine, Lino Hellings, I was chatting with her and she said: ‘So you’re searching. Ask yourself what is the one thing that if you are doing it, even if nobody cares or notices that you’re doing it, you’ll still be happy?’ I was like: ‘Wow, what a great question.’ To me, that is children’s creativity. I was like: ‘Okay, that’s it.’ So, that’s now the core of what I’m working on. For me, it still needs to be connected to social justice, social improvement. So, children’s creativity, social justice. That’s what I’m working on now: How can I create the next generation, saw the seeds for children to connect to their resource of creativity and make the link in using that for social good.
More is more
If you look at the current time we are in, there seems to be huge movement to ‘good’, going good and that becoming more normal. There are so many cool sharing spaces, cars, houses, I totally love it. I don’t see what I am doing in competition with that general paradigm. I see what I’m doing as a contribution. That the more people that work on creating social good and finding different ways in different aspects of our lives, to rethink that and include what’s good for the planet and for the people. And are we doing it in a sensible way. We need that mass movement of all the minds we have to take things to a better paradigm. I remember, say in 2003, it was kind of the height of programs against AIDS, which I was also working on, to prevent and education to young teenagers. And people said: ‘There are already so many programs.’ And it was so clear to me that we needed all these efforts. We needed the churches to speak out. We needed school programs. We needed medicines that worked to be developed for AIDS. We needed lobbies. We needed policy changes. And now you see, in most of the African countries, AIDS has become a contained problem. It’s not gone, but it has become contained. It is no longer the epidemic growing, taking over everything, that it was. And I hope the same thing happens with social good. A huge engagement of loads of people in all aspects of their life will take us to a sustainable planet and a more peaceful society. So for me, the more, the better.
