Creative Institute - Inspiration Is No Competition
Creative Institute is a young educational and advisory nonprofit organization. We act as a catalyst for creative processes by providing external support to people that lack the confidence or the know-how. We look for creative opportunities and help implement projects. We create and support professional creative communities. We connect people from the nonprofit, business and scientific sector to provide non-formal education and innovative problem-solving solutions.
National
Czechia
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It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
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Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): Kreativní institut, z. ú. (Creative Institute) Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Jiří Last name of representative: Švehla Gender: Male Nationality: Czechia Function: CEO Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Skuherského 1463/24 Town: České Budějovice Postal code: 37001 Country: Czechia Direct Tel:+420 608 496 464 E-mail:dita@kreatins.cz Website:http://kreatins.cz
URL:https://www.facebook.com/kreatinscz Social media handle and associated hashtag(s): #inspirace #nenikonkurence #kreativniinstitut #kreatins
Creative Institute is a young educational and advisory nonprofit organization founded in January 2022. We act as a catalyst for creative processes by providing external support to people that lack the confidence or the know-how. We look for creative opportunities for primarily young people and help implement their projects. We create and support professional creative communities. We connect people from the nonprofit, business and scientific sector to provide non-formal education and innovative problem-solving solutions. Our team is made of people with experience from educational and creative fields. We connect creativity and education to offer real-life work opportunities and to transform the creative industrial ecosystem. We reside in České Budějovice, a regional city of 100 000 inhabitants, in a brownfield in the town center where military barracks used to be and share this space with the local cultural hub Žižkárna. Our activities are following: 1) production of workshops within the framework of our annual cycles called Professionals for NPOs, Professionals for Science and Professionals for Schools; 2) physical implementation of thematic studios - creative ateliers - throughout the city, each with a transdisciplinary and multidimensional overlap; 3) practical training for students and young practitioners in creative industries; 4) organization of creative camps for students of different creative majors; and 5) mediation of internships in our partnering organizations. So far, we have organized a series of workshops mentored by top experts from creative fields - Production Forum, NonProfit Marketing, Anatomy of a Project, Rigger Training and Challenges of Creative Renewal. We founded Teatro Svjötlo - a multimedia studio which offers weekly workshops. We have established cooperation with the Biology Centre CAS - a national public research institution founded in 2006. We start with ourselves, in the middle of what we know, to help others reach their creative goals.
Creative Mindset
Inspiration Above Competition
Circular Education
Transforming Communities
Innovative Self-Management
Sustainability for us means challenging creative minds by giving them the skillset to sustainable self-development and self-managing abilities. Our activities are sustainable because we aim at a continual development of our initiative based on real-time needs of the local community and beyond. We emphasize the sustainability of educational and cultural values and a comprehensive, self-evolving and circular system of learning, teaching and working through innovative pedagogical methods and real-life experience. A crucial sustainable principle of our educational process is the multi-level engagement of our students, clients, scientists and business experts. By creating a multidimensional network of contacts, we implement not a linear, but a circular system of education to satisfy the ongoing supply and demand of the creative market. We believe in the self-sustainability of such a circular system where anyone can become a student, teacher or expert. In our activities, we show our clients sustainable ways of managing their projects and how to develop and manage them far into the future. We lead by example and so, not only externally, but also internally, we choose to work with people who are open to long-term solutions and innovative approaches. As an evolutionary organization, we focus on working from the bottom up, encouraging self-assessment and transparency in all our activities. Due to the absence of hierarchical management, we are able to further develop our initiative based on the internal motivation of our members, and thus act as a model microworld that represents the requirements of the broader creative community.
In terms of aesthetics and quality of experience, we strive to cooperate with top lecturers, teachers, experts and scientists in their fields to enhance the positive experience our clients can get from participating in our activities. First, we focus on high aesthetical and architectural qualities when creating new or temporary event-spaces to activate professional creative communities, motivate participants of our workshops, camps and trainings, and educate our students. We always choose a space that is somehow unique, creative and inspirational. Since we established our residence in the cultural center Žižkárna, we have focused on taking care of this community space to enhance its aesthetic value by inviting in lecturers, artists, business experts and the local community to join in on informal thematic and transdisciplinary meetings, workshops and gatherings. Second, we demand high aesthetic qualities from projects we support and we motivate our clients to think in advance about the cultural benefits their projects bring to the local community and beyond. In all we do, we promote positive emotions in a safe space where education and creativity go hand in hand. We educate specific groups of people, such as NPOs managers, scientists and students of creative fields who then have the required skills to improve the overall quality of experience of what they do for the broader public. Our team continually educates themselves in the new trends of creative industries and actively follows the needs of the local creative communities to always stay on top of the game. The aesthetics and quality of experience of our initiative is encoded within our educational process itself. The expertise we bring to our clients, the transdisciplinarity, openness, circularity and multi-level engagement - that is what awakens the mind to feel inspired and create beautiful things, in all stages and on all levels of the process.
We promote inclusion in all aspects of our activities. We provide opportunities for everyone because we believe that education is a value accessible to everyone, socially, ethnically, culturally and in terms of disabilities. We create a safe and enriching environment which is capable of managing itself and is able to compensate for the deficiencies of individuals. We run and support safe spaces that are socially diverse and allow for no discrimination. We eliminate prejudices in the very core of our education system by emphasizing diversity, cooperation and sharing. The cultural space where we reside - Žižkárna is a safe space and accessible to everyone. We take care of our clients on an individual basis, and thus we have no difficulties to compensate for any type of disabilities. A proportionate part of the cost of our educational and advisory activities is on the side of our clients. The main part comes from the private and scientific sectors in the form of donations and volunteering. We have tested an evaluation system of sponsored access to our activities, where all paying participants have the right to choose and promote applicants who wish to participate but are financially limited, based on a specific set of criteria. We also offer subsidies to different social groups, such as students, single mothers and anyone who is in an unfavorable financial situation.
The activities of the Creative Institute have had a notable impact on the local community and civil society. We have pursued a multidimensional model of informal education for anyone interested in the creative fields - students, NPOs managers, technical and technology workers, event production specialists and scientists. They benefit from the participation in our activities, as they gain a special skill set to improve their know-how. We provide a connection among creativity, science and business and thus create real job opportunities for young creatives. As our activities are widely accessible to the common public, we inspire the broader community to become interested and involved in creative and cultural events. We inspire young students to pursue their interests. With the help of our transdisciplinary and multidimensional model of non-formal education they easily find a way to become experts in their fields of interests. We lead by example, and as a rising organization we have focused on our internal workings, as well. For these reasons, we have organized workshops that focused on the topics of production, marketing, leadership and fundraising to not only help our clients, but also our organization grow. Before the Creative Institute was founded, we worked in the production of cultural projects and gave opportunities to young creatives within the local event-making organization Budějovický Majáles. We inspired a dozen of them to carry on professionally. They now volunteer to share their know-how and expertise with our clients and students in our workshops, practical training, camps and studios. They have become a great asset for the Creative Institute and the local community. By promoting our residential space - Žižkárna, we have attracted specific communities to attend the space, thus making it more visible and approachable to the broader public.
The Creative Institute came into being as an idea in the minds of a few friends from different creative industries and with different educational backgrounds who wanted to do things differently. The implementation of our initiative has been ongoing. Before the official foundation in January 2022, we established a close cooperation with Assoc. Prof. MgA. Hana Průchová, PhD., the Vice-Dean for Research at the Theatre Faculty of Janáček Academy of Performing Arts, who has been a great mentor to us and helped us set the foundation stones of our initiative. After the Creative Institute was formally founded, we managed to secure partnerships with Borovka Event and ZL Production companies, who are the major national players in the event production industry, to offer creative internships in the technical and production fields. In August 2022, we started cooperation with Magdalena Müllerová from the Creative Europe Office and Budějovice 2028, an organization solely responsible for the ECC 2028 application, in the field of project management and creative subsidies. In September 2022, we established residency in the local cultural space Žižkárna that became our partner on a project called Creative Žižkárna to further develop this brownfield city space for various activities of the Creative Institute. In January 2023, we established cooperation with the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic and together we organized a workshop on the topic of subsidies for cultural projects funded by the National Recovery Plan. We are also in close contact with the national cultural networks Quo Vadis, kulturo Jižní Čechy, Nová Síť and we cooperate closely with the regional cultural department in terms of joint workshops and creative opportunities for students.
Creative Institute gains from years of experience of its founding members, involved in event production, technical jobs in the event industry, theater technology and educational fields. It came into being as a reaction to the stiffness of the conservative system of education and working methods. In our jobs, we encountered a lot of top notch technical equipment and only very few staff members who were open to implement innovative approaches and were willing to include young people. At schools, we witnessed single-mindedness and a success-oriented approach, which led to students losing their inner motivations to do anything. We decided to use our expertise and benefit the creative sector and the common public in ways we knew were desired. The disciplines and knowledge fields our initiative has been designed and implemented on are as variable as the creative sector itself. By definition, it comprises marketing, event production, arts, crafts, design, audiovisual arts, performing arts, but also the education industry and public and private services. To us, in the Creative Institute it means everything that involves a creative mind and innovative approaches, thus we work with anyone who is in search of improvement in any stage of their endeavors. To maintain and fully develop our organization we focus on working with people from non creative fields, as well. We benefit from our cooperation and partnerships with the municipality districts and the scientific sector that assist us in implementing our initiative in the more official and formal ways.
Creative Institute as an educational organization is innovative because it is based on self-management of individuals and the system as a whole, which is self-complementary and circular. It is a system enabling a spiral evolutionary process of management and execution, based on gradual replenishment of the specific fields of creative industries. Its innovative character comes from years of experience and dissatisfaction with the official education system where it is desirable to choose one major for life without any possibility to gain skills in another professional field. It does not reflect the basic needs of this time, such as flexibility, evolution of one’s needs or new trends in cooperation. In comparison, we focus on the creative needs of individuals in the ever changing environment. We offer new pedagogical methods, such as interactive lectures, blended learning, design-thinking, project-based learning, peer teaching and feedback, inquiry-based learning, crossover teaching and personalized teaching. For our practical training we provide new technologies swiftly, actively and individually to each student to enable their self-development in an updated and fast growing environment. We mediate internships in partnering professional companies for interested students. We help implement students' projects, offer them our services, contacts and fundraising opportunities. We present our activities on different levels of expertise and time duration. Every student has different ideas and goals. We try to reflect this reality and project it into specific educational assignments. We have not created a school, we have created an educational and advisory platform of communities within a multi-level and transdisciplinary dimension, ranging from common public and students to experts and scientists. Where you have the opportunity as a participant in education to be part of real projects, to help others with your opinion, feedback and support.
In the Creative Institute we believe that most of our applied approaches are replicable and can be transferred to other localities, organizations and contexts. One of the most important aspects of the transferability of our activities to other places is the presence of a specific cultural environment where the improvement of professional creative services is in high demand by the local communities. Our educational activities are easily replicable in cultural areas with a high potential of people interested in engaging with culture, yet not having the tools to do so. The basic structure of our circular educational system is replicable through establishing contacts and attracting top creative mentors, who can inspire the local creative community and create a safe space open to discussion and innovative ideas. Our system of non-formal education that is based on multidimensionality and transdisciplinarity, intertwining students, business, nonprofit and science on the vertical axis, and all creative fields on the horizontal axis, embraced by the fusion of theory and practice is also transferable into any field of expertise, even outside the creative sector. Our motto is ‘Inspiration is no competition’, and we believe that any place, group, or beneficiary in any context can be inspired by what we do. The methodology of our inner workings is also replicable, if an organic and self-managing institution is desirable. One of our ten-year goals is the transferability to other places of Europe. Our know-how is very open to anyone interested as we thrive for complete and utter transparency in anything we do.
Creative Institute came into being as an innovative solution to the difficulties our team had encountered during their creative and educational careers. It was an idea in the minds of a few friends who wanted to do things differently. Our core team is made of personalities with experience from the pedagogical and creative sectors. The basic value of our team is trust that our work is meaningful, and trust in the team itself. Mutual respect and humility among team members moves us forward as individuals. Due to our wide range of activities, we have chosen organic management of the organization, which allows us to develop individual activities at our own pace. We create our project voluntarily, so every opinion is important. Some of us are university students and their level of involvement varies throughout the year. We take it as a natural evolutionary method of development. Individuals in the team carry out each an agenda that fulfills them, thereby we put a great emphasis on self-management and personal growth. To fulfill our vision we move forward in open spirals. The tightest spiral is the Core, which contains 5 members. Jura (CEO) is responsible for the dramaturgy and gradual linking of individual activities. Dita deals with cross-border cooperation and fundraising. Anežka is in charge of production. Adam is in charge of technical implementation and running the Teatro Svjötlo studio. Vladimír covers all activities in terms of marketing. The wider spiral is the Board of Directors, they are our friends - people from practice who have the ability to advance our activities. The next spiral is composed of Right Friends - personalities cheering on our project from afar, watching our steps, giving mentoring advice and providing the necessary feedback. The widest spiral is created by Friends of the Project, which are organizations that cooperate with us on the implementation of our activities.
The main goal of our initiative towards global challenges is equal and fair access to top-quality education for everyone. We are open to everyone who is interested and willing. We improve the quality of creative service and the diversity of creative fields from different perspectives with the highest possible participation of interested parties. Our activities are designed to redress gender and social inequalities, which are still very much present in the formal education and the business world within the national context. We believe that civil society, culture and arts play a very essential role in the development of each individual. By accepting different cultures and cultural ideas we can reinvent the solutions to any social issues. We are confident that people can face global crises through life-long creative education that enables them to see innovative solutions. Equality, diversity and inclusion are essential to our endeavors and we have demonstrated such in everything we have achieved so far. As an educational institution we cannot detangle most of the global challenges the world faces, but we can significantly change the way people perceive the world around them. The circularity and sustainability of our educational system is crucial to change the minds of many, thus contributing to a better future for everyone. Our workshops, studios, camps, practical training and internships are designed to help our clients detangle small-scale problems in ways that enable them to acquire the skills to approach any problem from an innovative point of view. Just as we believe in self-management and organic evolution of our initiative, we believe that a bottom up approach towards global issues is desirable and functional. We believe that by bringing creativity and innovation into education we contribute to a humble, confident and respectable society, starting with the smallest communities and gradually evolving.
Creative Institute was established in January 2022. So far, we have managed to produce five workshops for the nonprofit sector - Production Forum in April, NonProfit Marketing in October, Rigger Training and The Anatomy of a Project in November and the Challenges of a Cultural Renewal in January. We have validated our assumption that our team has the know-how and the desire to organize events and activities that supply the demand of the creative sector. During summer 2022, we structured the core ideas of the initiative. We established an organizational structure, defined our vision, mission, short-term and long-term goals. In August 2022, we set up our residence in the local cultural hub Žižkárna, which became our partner for an unrelated project Creative Žižkárna, where we plan to conduct our activities on a larger scale. We founded Teatro Svjötlo - a multimedia studio for amateurs interested in multimedia, technical production and design. We published the Creative Institute Booklet, built the website, established cooperation with the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, with the ECC 2028 candidate organization Budějovice 2028, the regional cultural department, the municipality and the Biology Centre CAS to organize creative courses for scientists in science popularization. In 2023, we have no small goals. In February, we are launching a 13-week workshop on technical basics - sound, light and video in Teatro Svjötlo studio. In March, we are starting a ten-part cycle Professionals for NPOs with European lecturers. In June, we intend to organize a marketing creative camp for marketing students. In autumn, we are going to produce a conference on the 3D world within the cycle of Professionals for Schools. We also intend to become a professional organization within a year so that our team can gain financial stability and focus solely on the work in the Creative Institute, as all our work has been done on a volunteer basis.
In the Creative Institute, we aim at sustainability in all we do. Our prirority under the program of Professionals for Schools is to support the teachers' capacity to develop sustainable competences and skills and promote positive action. We would like to contribute to teachers' professional development by connecting them with experts in creative fields to share their experience and expertise and bring creativity into education. We believe that thinking creatively develops adaptability and exploratory thinking which is necessary to tackle the today's world issues and to come up with innovative problem-solving solutions. Our educational system is based on the collaboration, cooperation and inspiration sharing among various subjects - students, business and scientific world. This multi-dimensionality and inter-disciplinarity of our educational and managing activities provide complex solutions, systems thinking and create safe and supportive learning environments. Our endeavors are based on an active involvement of all participating subjects, such as students, business experts, staff, local, regional and national authorities, research and innovation community, scientists.
