Reinvention and Revision
Apiary X is an opportunity to reinvent and revise a way to work, to collaborate, and to present myself and the people I like to work with, to make opportunities to do that work. My experience as adjunct professor, as gig to gig researcher, writer, educator and communicator, let’s me say with confidence that all excellent work comes from collaboration, from people working closely with each other respecting different viewpoints and subject positions, reaching to understand the different needs to be fulfilled through the project. I have conceived of Apiary X as a platform through which - for structural, professional, and practical reasons - that work can be done.
While the Apiary X platform is in itself too new to have its own portfolio to present at the moment, this is a new incarnation of a lifetime of collaborative partnerships geared at doing top-notch projects. Some that I have been pleased and gratified to take a lead part in range from the Clamorous Intentions Curatorial Collective in the late 20th Century through to the Sector Inc. which was able to explore - at its best - community hub building, present visions and models of what that could look like and do, in the context of Newmarket, Ontario. Newmarket is a special place even as it is a typical smaller Canadian city; it has an historical town centre with great bones, struggling with staying viable because of complex issues of transportation, parking, box stores, the realities of the working life of its residents, more car traffic, The scope of the potential for such small cities to make it all work is so interesting, as they have so much in terms the Political Scientist in me might call civic society or social capital. Locals would see that in what they do with their volunteer and faith-based organizations, what the town council tries to do, what the Province supports and the Feds might do.
That exploration, the community and regulatory environment scanning work, the literature review,, the mapping work, the comparative international analysis, the feasibility-study research and writing; that was great work. It took a strong team of researchers, a cartographer with strong GIS and a city planner’s training, and a graphic designer on board. Such work also needs a committed partnership of funding stakeholders, so partnership and collaboration across the community.
Engaging with stakeholder, funders, strategic partnerships and scaling up the team needed to meet the requirements of projects is what Apiary X is for. Projects that are about community-building, community-capacity, and viable innovation in the intersection between public, private, agency and not-for-profit, that is what Apiary X can really sink our experience and resources into.
