GEL Conference - Day 1 - 28 April 2011
GEL Conference is held in the Times Center, near Times Square in New York City and it's my good fortune to be here. It's a conference that many delegates return to year after year - the name tags indicated how many times each person had been. This could be up to 11 as GEL started 9 years ago, and GEL Health has been held twice.
After a welcome from Mark Hurst, GEL founder and person who looks too youthful to have done all he has done, we heard from Nell Minnow, film reviewer and corporate governance expert who spoke about corporate failure, how it happens and how to learn and recover from it. She points out that failure makes people brave, success can lead to fear of change, especially if you're not sure why you're successful. Three things you should not say: we have always done it this way; no-one else will notice; no-one else said anything.
Next up were a trio of cartoonists, Diffee, Dernavich and Kanin. They entertained us with presentations of their work and some on the spot cartoons created on themes from the floor. You can find a bit more about them at fisticuffsshow.tumblr.com
The next session gave us the choice of joining an impro group, juggling workshop from the Flying Karamazov Brothers, or Zentangle drawing class. I took the latter and learnt about a fascinating method of drawing using simple components to create complex patterns and images. Zentangle is used all over the world in all kinds of settings from individuals to schools, hospitals and prisons as a way of giving people an activity that they can't fail at, and providing a defined focused task that can give a sense of achievement, escape from external distractions, a form of artistic meditation, physical coordination of eye and hand with pencil on paper.
At the lunch break, we all scattered across Manhattan and Brooklyn to join different excursions or workshops. I took the subway to East Village to Green Map Studio where Wendy Brawer, founder of the Green Maps concept, talked about her work that has now been taken up in 740 cities in 55 countries. She began this work in the early 1990s after attending the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The idea was to create a way of showing people the environmental and cultural features of the place in which they live, and developing mapping tools and iconography so that people can make their own maps according to their particular interests and concerns. A Green Map of Adelaide was done in 1998 through a project with Urban Ecology Australia and Adelaide City Council. Time this was updated!
We were introduced to the process of map making by Connie Brown of Redstone Studios, and had the chance to make a map of our own. Wendy led a walking tour around the local area that included several of the 8 community gardens in East Village. One of these had a swale for water capture with turtles in residence, chooks and baby chicks, raised beds for vegetables and a nest tree house.
