Big Thought, Byron Sanders tap creativity to prepare youth for workforce success

About 65 percent of today’s schoolchildren will ultimately work in a job or career that doesn’t exist today, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That makes preparing those students for the future more difficult than ever.

Dallas-based education nonprofit Big Thought is taking on this challenge and more.

Big Thought, formed 30 years ago, works with local and national partners to ensure all students have access to creative learning opportunities that prepare youth for success in work and life.

In this interview, Byron Sanders, president and CEO of the organization, describes how Big Thought is focusing on creativity to give students the job and college readiness skills necessary for a rapidly changing world and economy.

What’s new or changing at Big Thought? Historically, Big Thought has been known as an arts organization. We use the arts, and that’s where a lot of our work takes place. But it’s so much more than just art. It’s also STEM. Science, technology, engineering and math is an important and prevalent component of our work. It’s also service learning. It’s design thinking. Art is one element of what is our core, which is creativity.

Why is that important? We’re framing our work differently with our stakeholders, our funding community, our students and our partners themselves. If you think about where we are in 2018 and beyond and what work is looking like and what it’s turning into, you have machine learning, artificial intelligence, and you’ve got automation showing up everywhere. It’s cutting across all parts of work, too. Blue-collar and white collar. Jobs as we know it are either changing, being eliminated, or being created. And the world is speeding up to the degree that we are becoming less apt, as the adults and educators, to predict what the world is going to look like even five years from now.

How are workforce needs evolving? The statistic is that 65 percent of kids today are going to be working in jobs that don’t even exist. Another statistic says by 2030, 85 percent of job postings will be for jobs that, again, don’t exist today. If the world is that dynamic — it’s so dynamic that you can’t even imagine it — then how do you prepare a young person to step into that dynamic?

How do you? (Writer and futurist) Mark Ford, and also entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban and macroeconomists are all saying the same thing. Young people need to learn how to build the creative muscle. They need to learn how to channel creativity into productivity, to be creative problem solvers. The second element that’s less discussed but is starting to bubble up in a lot of different places is their social and emotional well being. It’s the skill sets to understand humans. So build your creative muscle and to build your ability to build complex human relationships. Those are the things that have the most value in a world that is so dynamic. We call that the creative economy.

What are components of this economy? In the creative economy, the creators are the ones that are in most demand, as opposed to saying that the people in demand are financial services people, lawyers or (others). It’s the people who can live on the front edge of creation, on the frontiers of what’s possible, driving change and innovation and also being able to catch that wave, that cycle of iteration, where you’ll have a new technology or new innovation, but it’s only going to be new now for an even shorter period of time. So finding your first job is just the beginning. It’s changing. Creativity is what it’s all about. We are in the business of building that creative muscle and we’re doing that in a number of different ways.

How? We have two big buckets of our work. One is our direct programs. It’s our staff. We’re taking our people and we’re creating programs that have a lot of structure. The second is, we’re creating entire systems. We’re the intermediaries, the backbone for a system of a number of different stakeholders working together to increase access to creative learning experiences. To increase the dosage, things like that. Those two things combined is how we say we close the opportunity gap. Both of the two buckets are designed to create creators.

What’s an example of what that looks like? One of our most creative programs is called Creative Solutions. It’s a workforce program in the arts, and we’re doing it with a student population that a lot of folks say it’s really difficult to see results. We’re working with kids who have been adjudicated and are in the juvenile justice program and are on probation. We’re taking kids that have had all different kinds of offenses.

Are you turning them into artists? Many of them are not going to go on to be artists. But they go on to a number of different things, whether they go into mechanics, or go off to college to earn a degree in teaching, in education, you’ve got some people who are now actually working on a wide range, but they’re going through a seven-week program where they’re working as artists.

Isn’t overcoming past adversity a theme of the program? The theory is that you don’t end up in the juvenile system just because you didn’t have anything to do on a Tuesday. I mean, typically these young people are coming from something. Maybe coming from an adverse community environment or an adverse childhood experience that led them to this place. We said, you start off with these artistic expressions that are low-risk, high-reward, just to enter them into a creative space. To start to break down the masks that a lot of us carry and definitely the young people who have gone through something carry. But they’re doing it in in a setting where they’re not a student, but they’re an actual employee. There is a stipend attached to being in this program. By the end of the seven weeks, they have to produce either a digital arts production, a visual arts production or performing arts.

What becomes of that? It ends up being the channel through which we teach the social and emotional skills and the creative access skill sets. These young people, because the creative process has led them to being able to find their voice and address a lot of what trauma they had to go through, now as a creator, they’re living their best lives. That has led to us having the lowest recidivism rate of any of the county programs that are in this category. We are working with juveniles in detention. That’s just one example of how creativity can actually lead to the next thing for them.

 

View the full article by the Dallas Business Journal.