This page for The Artists' and Humans' Projects

is under construction.

MISSION [and PURPOSES] STATEMENT

We want to encourage attention

to artists and humanists

who are

finding a response to human needs

and finding solutions

for challenging problems

through creativity.

We want to discover

about the relationships

between creating and caring.

In Celebration of Project Leaders and Allied Co-Workers

While the decisions for the Cultural Achievement Awards have centered upon the content of the projects as examples

of human-service work with unique benefits and with a meaningful cultural message, AHProjects spent a great deal of time searching for common qualities amidst the various contributions from the project leaders and their allied co-workers. We sensed that there was something especially significant in identifying the common qualities of human input, believing that these descriptions might provide a kind of guidebook for what is required from aspiring creators in years to come.

We offer the Cultural Achievement Awards as a moment of opportunity for

CELEBRATING HUMAN CREATIVITY

IMAGINATION will always remain a mystery as to its source. It allows one to see things and sense things before they are fully materialized. While imagination may involve the appearance of new and previously unseen elements, it may also pertain to looking at the commonplace with a discerning view that yields new insight. It is not just the thinking that we’ve heard described as “outside of the box”. It is a capacity to discover and reveal the hidden qualities within the box as well.

We celebrate the IMAGINATION that brought the possibility of your project to you and was instrumental in shaping its development.

CREATION requires a set of skills that enable one to take action, to do the necessary tasks, to bring what is imagined into actual manifestation. Creation is labor. Creation demands that talent must run through a gauntlet of obstacles on the way to achieving a substantial result. Thusly, creation demands willingness and perseverance and other attributes of character. And when the imagination calls for a creation that has few or no prior models to follow, the creation demands courage and tolerance, for there is no certain outcome.

We celebrate the CREATION skills and the CREATION efforts that were instrumental in actualizing each element of your vision and in making its manifestations available for others to experience and to benefit.

CARING compels one to consider a set of questions about the implications of the creation, to consider how it will affect people and conditions. Incited by the passions of imaginative ideas and vision, each creative process invites a questioning process, calling into use such methods as research, introspection, collaborative dialogue, experimentation, prayer, meditation, reverie. Caring is that attribute which is most closely associated with the joining of the mind with the heart.

We celebrate the CARING that has been required to make it happen…we especially celebrate the CARING that came from the questions that you have asked, with your efforts to connect with and to attune with those that you wish to serve, so that the fire of enthusiasm that you carry becomes a light of illumination.

Can you say more about the motivations for the Cultural Achievement Awards?

"I think the better image of our purposes for the Cultural Achievement Awards with AHProjects is to invite the beginnings of a parade through which we may all take some pleasure in what marvelous floats and exhibits pass our way, all displaying a unique blending of imagination, creation skills and caring.

While one might find a any one of the floats particularly attractive, the parade of floats offer the greatest pleasure to appreciate and enjoy altogether the variety and abundance of imaginative creations on display, each with their accompanying stories of creative efforts in process and in results."

Michael Morrison, LCSW, co-founder and acting director of The Artists' and Humans' Projects