Transcript

Building the Creative Economy: Joe Rolfe: TEDxMonroe.mp4

[Music] I am tasked to tell you a little bit about Star Home Place and a lot about the creative economy. Star Home Place is located out in Oakidge about 30 miles from Monroe in the middle of a cotton field or or cornfield, what used to be a cotton field. Uh we are in an area of the state that is somewhat forgotten by Baton Rouge and somewhat forgotten by uh Washington or at least so we feel sometime and we're in we're in a Oakidge is a small town but one of the barriers we need to break is the idea that a small town means a small idea. Oakidge has certainly proven that by being the home pl home site of uh Centry Link and Monroe has certainly proven that by being the the uh parents and grandparents of Delta Airlines. The fifth district of the congressional fifth district in North Louisiana grows more row crops in agriculture than any other district in the nation. And agriculture contributes some 10 billion dollars a year to our economy. Despite this, we're the ninth poorest district in the nation with average per capita income at about $27,000 and a uh unemployment rate that's 10% in general and much higher than that for some segments of our population. We need not express expect Baton Rouge or Washington or anyone else to take us in hand and try to straighten out the weaknesses that we have in our economic situation. We need to do that on our own. And what I am proposing is that we do it by building a creative economy which is a different kind of economy that you're than you're probably familiar with. Um the other idea is other barrier that we need to break is the notion that good ideas come from New York or California. We can have them here and we do not always have to follow. We can lead. For 16 of my 60 years, my companion in life and best friend was an artist by the name of Star Marie Reeves who grew up in North Georgia. She was a wonderful portrait painter and a red head and she squealled when she laughed and purple was her favorite color and I miss her very much. She died from complications of diabetes at the age of 54. Louisiana incidentally has one of the highest rates of death from diabetes of anywhere in the anywhere in the country. Our years together were bathed in creativity. She painted, she did boutiques, she sewed uh and she would every week was a new creative project or enterprise. At the same time she was painting and sewing and doing boutiques. I was drawing floor plans and crafting gourds which was my creative outlet or or my two creative outlets. So our years together as I say were bathed in creativity. With her passing I did not want all that creativity to end in my life. So I came up with the idea of building Star Home Place as a memorial to her to make it a place where creative people could get together and do creative things and hopefully uh to to tag on to the last presentation some of the coffee house effect would take a place and new ideas would be created by the intersection of different people's backgrounds and skills. Not so long ago in America there were places where people gathered. They were sometimes a shop class, sometimes a grandparents farm, sometimes just a shade tree, rather famously a bicycle repair shop, uh, garages, basement. People got together and tinkered. Uh, adults worked on tractors, young men worked on cars, musicians jammed, computer geeks hacked, and everybody shared their knowledge and their skills and encouraged the dreams of others. It was in these places that the can do attitude of Americans was nurtured. We went out from there to win the space race. We we won the Cold War. We've won a couple of world wars. And it it behooves us not to forget where those mindsets and the strength of those characters came from. Starhome Place hopes to be a place somewhat like that where all of these different threads of the region can be joined together and this the coffee house effect can take place and the new synergies can take place to you know provide us with new ideas for the future. Uh we are struggling with that. We are a community masquerading as a museum out in the cotton field in Oakidge. Uh we've worked over 10 years. We've had some successes and some failures. Our first few years we offered full scholarships to the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. The idea being people would go off to the folk school and bring back wonderful skills which they should which they could then share with those locally. Rather than sending a whole lot of people away, we were just going to send out representatives to bring back the skills. Unfortunately, as a proof that there's a need to increase the status of creativity in our society, we were unable to give away the scholarships. We we gave away one in four years, which was we got one application. So, we you know, we have discontinued that program. One of the other things that we did was create a map, a cultural landscape map of northeast Louisiana, which exhibited the the culture, geography, and history of the region. We did this to be given away to schools, libraries, museums, courouses, and cultural institutions. Uh the map took three years to draw and would have cost a great deal of money had it not been done entirely by volunteers. Unfortunately, and sadly, we've only been able to give away about half of them. The schools don't seem particularly interested in the cultural institutions have been slow to accept them even though even though they're free. Uh that map however led to another map uh of Bayou Bartholomew which led to an involvement with creating canoe trails on these various streams in North Louisiana. And a canoe trail is a is a very nice amenity for creative people to get out into the into the wilderness and to experience nature on a personal basis. The most successful part of our effort has been our community days. uh one Saturday a month, the second Saturday of the summer months except August because it's too hot. Uh we get to we get everyone who is interested in Star Home Place together to do whatever it is that they do. There may be a boat builder and a blacksmith and a machinist and an engineer and somebody that just likes to cook, uh a gun engraver, a leather crafter. All of these people get together and share their skills. Our most popular one has been the one that takes place in the early early part of the year in April when the blacksmiths come from five or six different states. When you've got five or six people hammering on anvils, it's a lot of fun. And we those people have formed a community over a much broader area than we had originally intended. It's a area that stretches across several states, but that's blacksmithing is the most popular of the skills that are the resurgent industrial crafts. However hard one our um successes are, they are really very modest in relation to the potential overarching benefit of having a creative economy in northeast Louisiana. We are a community masquerading as a museum out in the cotton field. Uh I never really intended to start I intended to start a community. I didn't intend to start a museum. It's really something that happened to me. It's sort of like a grandparents farm for everybody except your grandparents didn't throw anything away. There there are 19 buildings full of tools and equipment from for everything from well woodworking, blacksmithing, machine shop, sheet metal shop, grist mill, loom room, uh music room with a Hammond B3 with a Leslie for the ones that are into the music. We even have our own little radio station that broadcasts just to the yard. And for all this tools and equipment uh we need people to bring them to life. We have people from dis different disciplines that come uh on occasional months and will demonstrate their skill but we need to have more people that are coming to do the creative things that they do. And they're not always they're not always physical skills. Uh the musicians obviously are are different. But I had one lady tell me she said, "Oh, I'm not creative. I just write." Well, I've been trying to get her to come and write stories about conversations that she has in Star Home Place, but writing and music are certainly part of the creativity. And we did have one community day when the when the uh chainsaw sculptor and the poetry club showed up at the same time. That was not the coffee house effect. We have a good many artists that come and do paintings and a lot of photographers. This is a very skilled local artist that some of you will know from Century. But here we are needing people and that's that's our biggest need. Uh you know finances are one thing but people without m even if we have the money with no people there to bring the place to life we're sort of at a lost cause. Uh another barrier that we need to break is the attitude that creativity is third grade fingerpainting and not worthy of the concern of serious adults. uh creativity is a great deal more than that and as a matter of fact it's one of the most potent forces uh economically and socially that that there is about the same time that I started with star home place uh a man named Richard Florida published a book called the rise of the creative class and he explained to me and to a lot of other people just how critical creativity was in the in the general culture of the world. It is it is the source of all new ideas. It is the source of new business plans. It's the source of new computer programs, new apps for your telephone and a thousand other small things that we are constantly being barged with new products uh that that come from creative people all over the world because it is at the center of innovation and commerce. It may be the most valuable commodity that there is, but it is not something that people are out trying to exploit. Uh and and to make matters worse, a lot worse, a lot of people have been told that they simply were not they were not creative or they didn't have talent. And that that mindset was pretty much done away with by a lady named Betty Edwards in writing a book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. She proved with research. The book's been in print for 40 years now that creativity can be taught and should be taught. But when you start telling somebody in the third or fourth grade, oh, you're just not talented. You sort of jump in and say, well, we don't have to worry about trying to educate that. I am certain, I guarantee you that I was not talented in math and I was not talented in spelling, but Miss Ernstein and Miss Alice and Miss Elby made me learn it anyway. Our educational system has gotten into a situation where we educate for letters and numbers but we don't educate for notes, colors and lines. And as technology changes in the futures that the need the the jobs and the work that is based strictly on text and numbers is going to more and more be taken on by machines. Uh and we we're already beginning to see this. But the jobs that can't be outsourced and the things that can't be replaced are the creativity that comes from human minds. So rather than being the first thing that gets cut when education gets cut, creativity training should be the last thing. It is not a mere nicity. There are sound business reasons for building creativity training into our educational system. Imagine what would happen if we educated for art and music with the same passion and diligence that we now expend educating for team sports. You would get 50 Timber McGra and 100 published writers and 20 noted chefs rather than just a few. Once uh if I told you that oil was located beneath our area, the the investment capital would flow in rivers to try to capitalize on that asset. And it it it is and it has and Monroe has benefit benefited greatly from it. But nobody the the the creativity that's in the minds of our people is really a much more valuable asset. The disadvantage that creativity has is that there's not a an established procedure for capturing it and exploiting it. And that is what we need to build. It's a bit like looking for comets in the night sky. You know they occur. You know they're there, but sometimes they're so fleeting you you you almost aren't sure that you saw them. So what we need to do and I think we can do it here in North Louisiana as well as anywhere else is develop the methods for capturing creativity and exploiting it and bringing it to the marketplace because the first region that learns how to do this is going to have a huge advantage in the world marketplace and I don't see why it can't be here. I have some dreams that are fairly big dreams. One of them is to see a a thriving star home place that's strong enough to survive without me, where people get together and drink lots of coffee and have lots of good ideas and enjoy uh and enjoy a a society that values creativity and innovation. I'd like for us to be renowned as an area where that takes place and where creativity and innovation are thriving. Uh in addition to a thriving heartstar home place, I would like to see contests conducted in music, in writing, in art uh on a on a an annual basis with prizes that were large enough to attract the uh interest of the general public to sort of raise the standing of creativity within the communities. And then if if my bigger dreams were realized, there would be traveling teachers with generous resources to share in all our schools to bring creativity to the forefront in each community and help people understand what its what its true importance is. Um, in closing, I need to say that the takeaway from this talk is that creativity can be taught to the young. It can be inspired in the adults and it can be capitalized on and exploited to bring improvement to our n to our area. That's the uh creative spark that I want you all to try to capture. Don't let those creative sparks in your own life slip away like comets in the night. take the creative option when you have the creative option in something to do and try to support the people that are thinking creativity thinking creatively and working in creative fields. Uh, one of the activities that I enjoy is historical reenacting. And one of the things that you do when you do historical reenacting is you you build a fire from flint and steel. And what you do is you strike the flint with the steel and you get one spark and you put it in a little ball of tinder and you nourish it very carefully by breathing on it until you have a flame that can light your way. And that's what I'm asking you all to do. I'm asking for your help to build a creativ economy in Northeast Louisiana. Thank you. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]