The mission of the Okanagan Institute
is to contribute to
the quality of creative engagement in the Okanagan through publications and events.
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Kelowna BC Canada
Telephone 250.870.2690
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Executive Summary
For the last eighteen or more months, the Okanagan Institute has
been actively pursuing its mission of being a strategic resource for the
creative sector in the Okanagan.
This Report presents the status of our efforts to date, the projects
and programs we have in the works, and the opportunities we suspect may
provide the next stages of our development.
One of the most visible signs of the work of the Institute have been
the weekly Express events taking place Thursday afternoons in
downtown Kelowna over the last year.
The Institute established Express specifically to highlight the work
and ideas of some of the most creative minds in our region
architects, designers, inventors, builders,
retailers, teachers, visual artists, writers and community activists. Express
also promotes the magazines of Wheat King Publishing: Okanagan Arts
and Okanagan Home. Our close association with the magazines gives us
an
opportunity to present issues and people who appear in the pages.
The Okanagan faces enormous challenges to not only preserve the
best of its distinctive identity, but at the same time be inclusive in its
approach to changing expectations and realities.
Attracting, nurturing and retaining creative people plays a critical role
in the economic viability of any region. The Okanagan Institute offering
its forums to allow these people to connect with one another, express
themselves, and invent the future.
The potential for the Okanagan Institute lies far beyond hosting
weekly events, and publishing books. Our aim is to become a catalyst for
creative expression of all kinds and a contributor to the production and
dissemination of new ideas and new works.
We invite you to take a look at what we have done, and where we intend
to go, and we hope you'll join us on this journey.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes. - Marcel Proust
We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some
of whose names we know, but some not. The storytellers go back and
back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old
shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the
spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.
Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a
moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration,
and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice
and the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker
is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by
the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods
wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for
it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us for good
and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt,
even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that
is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
- Doris Lessing, Nobel Acceptance Speech
RESOURCES
» Patricia Martin, Renaissance Generation: The Rise
Of The Cultural Consumer And What It Means For
Your Business. 2007.
» Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, Marlowe
& Company, 1999.
» Jason Potts, Art & Innovation: An
Evolutionary Economic View Of The Creative Industries,
Unesco Observatory E-Journal, Jan. 1, 2007
» Victoria Stasiuk, Building Alliances For Culture In
Your Community, Municipal World - 2004.
» Max Wyman, Presentation, Federal-Provincial-Territorial Meeting Of Ministers Responsible
For Culture and Heritage, Banff, Alberta - September
15-16, 2005
» Max Wyman, Why Culture Matters, Address,
Moncton, NB, February, 12, 2004.
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