co-founders/directors

Weave Associates

Theo Edmonds

Theo Edmonds is a Culture Futurist®, artist/poet, entrepreneur, and analytics innovator who bridges the creative industries, brain science, and technology with the future of work. With over 30 years of executive, artistic, and research experience spanning healthcare, social innovation, academia, and the creative economy, Theo has led groundbreaking projects for Fortune 100 companies, top-tier cardiovascular programs, city and state governments, family offices, universities, and national arts organizations. In 2024, Theo launched Creativity America, a decade-long collaboration with leading creativity research labs across the U.S. to drive business innovation.

http://linkedin.com/in/theoedmonds

Mazi Raz PhD

An educator, scholar, ethnographer, speaker, and a researcher in politics of inequality and leadership thinkways, and decolonizing places. He approaches his work in learning and leadership through the interplay of dramaturgy and enigma. In addition to his senior roles in the education field, he collaborates closely with Canadian artists to revive civic leadership.

LinkedIn

Brian Woodward PhD

In his role as a 'story listener' and 'story shaper' — as someone who believes it is vital that people be the authors of their own story — Brian has connected the arts, psychology and systems thinking to develop a range of innovative learning methods and techniques for leaders and multi-stakeholder groups attempting to address complex issues. He has decades of experience as a practicing psychologist, designer and facilitator of training and development programs for large companies and organizations. He is a believer in the development of human potential in group contexts and in the power of art to facilitate this to transform the way in which, as citizens, we see and engage with the world.

LinkedIn

Terry Irwin

Terry Irwin is an American designer, academic and Director of the Transition Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a key figure in the development of transition design—an area of design practice, study and research focused on design-led societal transitions towards more sustainable futures.

LinkedIn

Steffi Bednarek

Steffi is a consultant and writer on climate psychology, systems thinking, and trauma informed organisational change. She has 20 years of clinical experience and has worked as a consultant to government, the corporate sector, global financial institutions and large international NGOs. Her work focuses on the development of psychologically informed leadership in a world affected by inter-connected crises and combines psychological perspectives with collective trauma insights and living systems theory. Her book: Climate, Psychology and Change will be published in Spring 2024.

LinkedIn

Sha Xin Wei

Xin Wei has established transversal ateliers to pioneer techniques and technologies enabling people to collectively imagine alternatives to the way things are, and to create them. These techniques range from gestural media, responsive environments, to steerable enactive weather simulations, experimental music and performance.

His work is reciprocally informed by speculative philosophy and poetic technologies. Trained in mathematics at Harvard and Stanford, as Canada Research Chair in media arts and sciences, he brought the Topological Media Lab to flourish at Concordia in Montreal. While director of ASU’s flagship transdisciplinary program, the School of Arts, Media + Engineering, he also established the Synthesis atelier for transversal research-creation.

Working with adventurous colleagues to create porous autonomous zones for playful yet rigorous, and radical yet humane inquiry is a core passion of his as a mentor and creator

Academia

TED

Jae Rhim Lee

Jae Rhim Lee is a designer and artist whose work reimagines the mundane and the profound—eating and bodily waste, sleep, death, and consciousness. Her living units, furniture, wearables, and designed experiences propose new and often unorthodox relationships between the mind/body/self and the built and natural environment. She invented the Infinity Burial Suit ("Mushroom Death Suit”), an alternative burial method for people and pets. Her work has been featured in the National Geographic, the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, the Nobel Prize Museum, Vogue, Somerset House London, Wired, and the Aspen Ideas Festival. She is a TED Senior Fellow.

http://linkedin.com/in/jae-rhim-lee-6725663

Charity von Guiness

Charity is an entrepreneur, creative synthesizer, facilitator and generative conflict mediator. With 25 years of executive leadership in the art and creative space Von Guinness provides services that lead teams to interrogate the status quo and socialized assumptions to find unorthodox solutions through collective imagination.

Von Guinness champions the integration of artists into unconventional industries and contexts and specializes in navigating conflict in integrative ways that provide consensus and understanding. She is certified in Transformative Change Navigation, Sustainable Inclusion & Diversity, Systems & Design Thinking and Emergent Conflict Mediation.

Gordon Knox

Gordon is a deeply experienced cultural innovator, educator, and institution builder.  He has a profound sensitivity for the potency of cultural dynamics and a fundamental belief in the arts, artists and creative practice as a means for connecting, disrupting and effecting systemic change. Gordon’s skills and proclivities lie in building and developing cohesive teams, communities, institutions and organizations; a natural weaver, he attracts talented people and creates around him the alliances, partnerships and networks needed to see with new eyes, challenge assumptions and practices, dissolve social and cultural boundaries, and create concrete impact in the social sphere. 

LinkedIn

Gideon Kossoff PhD

Gideon teaches and researches transition design and ecoliteracy at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. He is co-Founder and Associate Director of the Transition Design Institute. Gideon studied and worked with eco-philosopher Murray Bookchin over several years, has worked with a number of grassroots green groups and networks in the UK, and was programme administrator and course tutor for the Holistic Science MSc, at Schumacher College, Devon, UK. He holds a Phd in design from the University of Dundee, Scotland. His thesis, in which he introduced the concept of transition design, was entitled ‘Holism and the Reconstitution of Everyday Life: a Framework for Transition to a Sustainable Society’. It is summarised in the book ‘Grow Small, Think Beautiful’ edited by Stephan Harding and published by Floris.

Projects

A selection of projects Weave Partners have been involved with:

• Delivered a series of creative interventions across social and healthcare institutions in Luxembourg that informed legislation and a fundamental restructure of services nationally.

• Pontos da Cultura / Cultural Hotspots – a multi-million dollar initiative led by Brazil’s Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, to bring digital literacy and internet access to pre- or non-literate communities in both rural and urban Brazil.  

• The Feast on the Street, a series of events, gatherings and exhibitions examining local foodways and empowering a network of indigenous and immigrant community gardens in and around the Phoenix area, culminating in 10,000 people joining a citywide festival and feast celebrating how local engagement produces collective self-sufficiency. 

• Global Arts Lab: a two-year international artist exchange project to support the interflow of ideas and perspectives held by communities and individuals in the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan with those in the US. 

• Musagetes Café Projects in Rijeka, Croatia and Lecce, Italy. Conceptualized and implemented inaugural projects in Rijeka and Lecce that resulted in dozens of artist-led social interventions in these two transforming Adriatic cities. Community empowerment and grass-roots social agency have delivered tangible environmental, educational and social improvements in both regions.

• Leaders’ Lab at Banff Centre: initiated and led (for 30 years) a vibrant learning lab aimed at integrating creative practices, arts processes, and ‘the power of place’,  into leader development programs. 

• Design Studio at Albert Health Services: curated a system-wide imagination of distributed leadership and re-enactment of learning-to-learn at one of Canada’s largest healthcare agencies. 

• Created many substantive learning and development programs throughout the world: 20 plus Master’s degree programs designed, research funding grown by tenfold, student recruitment increased by 35 percent. 

• Created big data businesses before it was a 'thing' and involved in imagining new worlds and designing new businesses around the world. 

• Decades of experience as a practicing psychologist, designer and facilitator of training and development programs for large companies and organizations.

• 30 years working with artists at Canada’s Banff Center to integrate creative arts practices into its leader development programs - increasingly involving and integrating artists and the artistic process into these. 

• Worked with many international organizations in areas of systems thinking, mapping and leader development — always striving to introduce an aesthetic dimension into this process. 

• Currently working with artists and musicians who facilitate large groups of people in museum and gallery spaces, to allow them to collectively identify, express and share their stories.

• The Social Impact of Arts, a Canadian Think-Do tank organized to re-imagine how arts and artists affect social values

What do we do?

WEAVE provides problem solving, consulting, and unity-building services to organizations and institutions committed to transformative change through the empowerment of individuals and communities.

NGOs, educational institutions, government organizations and municipalities seeking to empower their systems, increase effectiveness, enhance community engagement, and build identity through the example of collective empowerment will all benefit from an entanglement with WEAVE.

Learning as a way of being, placemaking as a form of community realization, and leadership as an example of both process and goal, these are the orientations and expertise of WEAVE.

Manifesto

WEAVE invites worldmakers, placemakers, policymakers, peacemakers, culturemakers, and changemakers to re-engage the world through issues that matter, with energy and a commitment to regeneration. With our network of partners, we have the capacity and confidence to address the significant issues facing us, and the skills and experience to activate learning, placemaking, and leadership within your organizations and communities. 

WEAVE considers placemaking to be an increasingly prevalent form of inquiry. Placemaking draws upon systemic wisdom. It threads collective imagination, toward a deliberate braiding of the public realm, creative spaces, participatory engagements, social practises, and ecological desires. Placemaking engenders an informal network of policymakers, artists, funders, planners, leaders and learners, who flow through varying rituals of gathering, perspective building, and intention shaping. 

WEAVE approaches leadership as a shared work among those engaged in revitalizing a hopeful future, in the marshalling of resources towards it, and in navigation around barriers. Those engaged in this work look inward for motivation, inspiration and energy; they look outward to collective engagement and followership. Learning is inherent in the work of leading, keeping it permanently curious, critically aware, effectively collaborative, and continually informed.

WEAVE sees learning as any process that leads to a capacity change in us, individually and collectively. Our attention is on three interlocking factors: learning to be me, learning to be we, and learning to weave. ‘To be me,’ we consider learning that interacts with life-world that forms the basis of permanent curiosity. ‘To be we,’ we employ project-based, collaborative, co-designed curricula that drive a powerful, adaptive global network of worldmakers. ‘To learn weaving,’ we transcend disciplines, partake in complex entanglements, and co-mingle in systems that are challenged or face collapse. 

WEAVE operates by working with clients using one of these initial areas of focus as our starting or entry point. We model interdisciplinary collaboration, place-based learning and ways to engage with complex challenges that relies on the fostering of local leadership capacity. All projects are committed to deep learning based on integrating worldviews, local expertise & multiple ways of knowing. The objective is collective insight to drive the project forward. Through our approach we begin to draw deep interconnections that reveal the qualities of the whole system - a process that allows us to work with others to nurture systemic wisdom.

WEAVE comprises a group of renaissance idealists, systems thinkers, psycho-geographers, and artists, with a deep admiration for the innate capacities of people and the incredible powerful agency of small groups. Intensely curious, sensors of deeper currents, fearless in exploring the unusual and unique, WEAVE members are equally adept with the logical and the aesthetic, with holding a strong ethical centre while working for collective betterment. All WEAVE members thrive on the fringes as explorers, pioneers, “hermenauts”, boundary-crossers; they seek to listen intensely to what wishes to live through them. The projects they undertake offer the opportunity to partake in the aesthetic of hope

Article by Alan Boldon commissioned by the Goethe Institute and delivered as a keynote lecture at Kiasma, the Finnish National Contemporary Arts Centre as part of Halikonlahti Arts and Ecology conference.

Climate Change: An Aesthetic Crisis

­­­­­­­Climate Change - an Aesthetic Crisis?

In this article I explore how climate crisis may - at least in part - originate from an aesthetic estrangement or even a kind of anaesthesia.

The absurdity of the way we think about environment sees us trying to decide at which point an apple that I take from a tree and eat stops being part of the environment and becomes part of me, or at which point a raindrop that finds its way into a glass and then my body and then out again is the environment.

As Thich Nhat Hanh has said: “we are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness”.. The article offers some examples from the arts of ways to heal this division and to remember we are nature.