Today CAN brings you "The Artist and Power," an excerpt from a research paper, “Leading Through Practice," by Scotland's On the Edge Research team. The full paper is an in-process presentation of the research gathered during the Artist as Leader program, which aims to understand artists' influence on shaping the role of creativity in culture, focusing on the concept of leadership. Say the researchers: “It opens up a new trajectory of thinking about leadership that is not predominantly management-based, in which the role of artist operating within the public realm is scrutinized for what it can reveal about creativity in general.” The editors of the paper, Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, invited four contributions — Linda Frye Burnham, Reiko Goto, Francis McKee and Tim Nunn — to demonstrate a range of perspectives. This excerpt looks at artists and the concept of power. [LINK]

Bethlehem, Pa.'s Touchstone Theatre has been added to CAN's Places To Study database, spotlighting its Professional Training Apprenticeship. The training focuses on creating original work in ensemble theater; creating original solo and ensemble performance in production and lab settings; performing at Touchstone and on tour; and "teaching in a variety of educational and empowerment programs to gain experience and understanding of how theater artists can guide communities in exploring creativity, while encouraging and articulating points of view and creating cultural exchange." Participation in the nine-month program, September-May, includes a monthly stipend. Auditions and interviews are held each spring. Example: Touchstone is currently working on The Lehigh Valley Black African Heritage History Project, collaborating with Muhlenberg College, Lehigh County Senior Center, Lehigh County Historical Society, Kutztown University and Northampton County Historical and Genealogical Society. [LINK]

The Global Peace Tiles Project offers some very useful workshop and discussion guides for educating young people about the global AIDS pandemic through art. For Peace Tiles, says the project's Lars Hasselblad Torres, young people tell their stories on eight-inch-square tiles using mixed-media techniques. They're produced during structured workshops that respond to local needs and the context of the young people themselves. Peace Tiles offers training and micro-grants to community-based organizations that would like to host a workshop. On the Web site are two well-produced guides that may help others in creating such texts: a discussion guide, "A Triumph of the Spirit," and the Workshop Design Guide. For World AIDS Day 2007, Torres wants groups to host local workshops and exhibitions and send him tiles for inclusion in a 2008 World AIDS Orphans Day mural. [LINK]

Students Jorgen Tandberg and Yo Murata are the winners of the Bat House Competition, and their design for an urban bat house will be built at the Wetlands Centre in South London. The competition was initiated this year by artist Jeremy Deller and the Bat House Partners to highlight the potential for architects, builders, home-owners and conservationists to work together to produce wildlife-friendly building design. The public was challenged to design a building of aesthetic and environmental excellence, built with sustainable materials, offering a home to bats and an educational visitor attraction. Tandberg and Murata, fourth-year undergraduates at the Architectural Association, designed a complex, beautiful structure that looks like a picture in a frame. Jeremy Deller won the Turner Prize in 2004 with "Memory Bucket," a film including three million bats leaving Frio Cave in Texas. [LINK]

The latest addition to CAN's BlogNet, appearing automatically on our front page, is the RSA Arts & Ecology blog from London. Arts & Ecology, a program of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA), supports the arts in examining and addressing social and environmental concerns in an interdisciplinary and international arena. They do conferences, publications and projects that look at arts efforts to challenge and propose solutions to pollution, waste and loss of natural habitats. The RSA began working to better the environment in 1770, offering the first prize for reducing industrial smoke emissions. Now the Arts team sits next to another major RSA project, CarbonLimited, encouraging citizens to help reduce the carbon emissions that increase global warming. This blog is gathering input for an elaborate upcoming site, Arts & Ecology Online. [LINK]

Sotheby’s Institute of Art will host 213 artists aged 62-97 at a December 3 reception to announce the findings of a pioneering study of aging artists in New York City. The artists, residing in the five boroughs and speaking Chinese, English and Spanish, were interviewed for “Above Ground: Information on Artists III: Special Focus New York City Aging Artists,” conducted by the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Teachers College Columbia University. This first needs assessment of its kind finds that they "have learned to adapt their whole lives to sustain their work" and "offer a great deal as a model for society." They rank high in life satisfaction and self-esteem; 91% would choose to be artists again; 77% communicate daily or weekly with other artists; and they're resilient and have an ongoing engagement with both their life and art. [LINK]

To "help put more muscle behind the mandates for arts education," the National Endowment for the Arts has created an Education Leaders Institute. Five multidisciplinary teams from U.S. states and municipalities will receive NEA support to discuss arts-education challenges at the first Institute March 2008 in Chicago, Illinois. The teams -- comprising school leaders, legislators, policymakers, educators, professional artists, consultants and scholars -- will discuss a shared arts-education challenge, such as assessment, leadership, curriculum development and access to arts learning, says the NEA. The first five teams to participate are from Alaska, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Carolina and Wisconsin, each led by a state education department ot arts council. It's modeled on the Mayors' Institute of City Design a 20-year partnership program of the NEA, U.S. Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation. [LINK]

In New York in December? Don't miss the chance to talk with the makers of "Mambo to Hip Hop: A South Bronx Story" at the second Hispanic New York Film Festival. Filmmaker Elena Martinez and director Henry Chalfont will be present for dialogue on November 30, 2007, after the screening of their acclaimed documentary about music, life and death in the South Bronx. The festival, November 27-December 8, comprises seven films made 2004-7 by Hispanics, most of them about living in New York. The director of each film will be present at its screening. The festival is a project of Columbia University's Instituto Cervantes in collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and curated by Marcela Goglio and Claudio Iván Remeseira. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you a new story about the artists of Portland's Sojourn Theatre, who learned a lot when they partnered with Wentworth Suburu. They wanted, says Sojourn's Maureen Towey, to use the car dealership for a production called "GOOD," their version of Brecht’s “Good Person of Setzuan,” as a frame for a play about business, ethics and community. They cut a deal with the Wentworths to use their commercial space for creating and showing a site-specific, traveling performance. "It was a model for innovative community partnerships that bridge the gap between arts and business," says Towey. "It expanded our notion of what a partner could provide. Partnerships need not center only around money or stories. Foremost, the Wentworths gave us a lot of hope for the intentions of partners outside the arts community. They saw the chance to help with an exciting, creative project and they jumped on it." [LINK]

Slum TV, the media arts project in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, has been busy. The first screening of newsreels by local residents in Korogocho was covered by Nick Wadhams on Voice of America radio, and you can hear his broadcast, along with analysis by local viewers, at . Also, Kenyan-born artist Sam Hopkins reports from the roof of his van about the third screening in Mathare at . New newsreels and dramas will be on the project Web site in two weeks, say the Slum-TV artists. "In the meanwhile, we are working with Jaume Nualart on subvideo , our step forward into the semantic Web. Nualart is a programmer and also active in the OLPC project (One Laptop Per Child), and his software will allow online translation tools for videos." [LINK]

Students from Massachusetts College of Art will be "dining and sleeping in the public domain" during "Second Culture Sleep Over" in the windows of Mobius' new Boston artspace. Tonight, November 26, 2007, Milan Kohout of Mobius Artists Group and his performance art students will have dinner and sleep over in the artist-run space's floor-to-ceiling windows in full view of the street to "dissolve the sense of private space and turn it into a space very nearly in the public domain." The group is exploring the Czech underground movement idea of "Second Culture," which initiated a peaceful revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989. Kohout, a Czech native, was a member of the "Second Culture" artist's movement and of the dissident human-rights organization Charter 77, a group of artists and activists nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. [LINK]

Audiences in Miami will receive Hanukkah gifts from The Feldman Dynamic during "Hanukkah in Little Havanka," December 4-11, 2007. The Feldman Dynamic, an actual family, will "bash the boundaries of reality theater" when they sit down to dinner and have an unscripted conversation and celebrate the Jewish winter holiday of Hanukkah. "The audience is privy to their familial banter and discussion of the holiday as they take on the traditional foods, candle-lighting and game-playing of the holiday," says their presenter, Camposition Studio. They'll also get "exquisite desserts" and Hanukkah gifts courtesy of the Feldmans. The piece, conceived and directed by Brian Feldman, stars Adrienne Feldman, Brian Feldman, Edward Alan Feldman and Marilyn Wattman-Feldman. Brian Feldman was conceived by Edward Alan Feldman and Marilyn Wattman-Feldman. [LINK]

A team of artists who call themselves Touchable Stories has been in Richmond, Calif., creating an interactive installation based on the lives and viewpoints of that community. "Richmond: The Story Continues," November 9-December 15, 2007, builds on community responses to "Richmond Introduction." The series, two years in development, asks “Who is Richmond?” The artists created rooms based community research and interviews. A dozen rooms were then connected to form a walk-through maze, each interactive and designed by a different artist, each using soundtracks created from the recorded stories. The Richmond project features the city's Native American presence, multi-use shoreline, place in the history of the Blues, Latino history, toxic legacies and the Tent City Peace Movement, "the grassroots nonviolence phenomenon born two years ago on the killing grounds of inner Richmond." [LINK]

Kids in Tajikistan, India, South Africa, Bolivia and Mexico will connect with counterparts in four U.S. cities through the Museums & Community Collaborations Abroad grant program. The museum-based exchanges are the result of a new partnership in cultural diplomacy between the American Association of Museums and the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The four funded projects are: "Dear Mr. Mandela, Dear Ms. Parks: Children’s Letters, Global Lessons" (kids/museums in Michigan and South Africa); the "Indo-U.S. Science Center Diversity Dialogue & Cultural Immersion Project" (science and tech musuems in New York and India); "Inside/Outside/North & South" (art and ethnographic museums in Denver, Bolivia and Mexico); and "Promoting Volunteerism to Improve Zoo Safety, Education and Animal Care" (zoos in Indiana and Tajikistan). Get plenty of interesting details on the AAM site. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you the third and final part of this part of Kevin M. Bott's project journal, "Notes on Prison Theater in Northern Uganda." This installment takes the reader inside the prison walls and describes the often gratifying, sometimes puzzling process of devising original theater with 100 Ugandan inmates over the course of a three-week prison theater project conducted in the summer of 2007. As Bott struggles with (what might be) malaria, translation, a tiny space and a shortened time frame, he learns many lessons: that there are differences between “high-context” and “low-context” cultures, that it's beautiful to have mutual permission to satisfy your curiosity about the “other,” that revealing your inner world can feel like "looking at your mind" and that an inmate’s sense of accountability and responsibility can put the typical “man on the street” to shame. [LINK]

The proposals deadline for presentations at MICA's March 2008 Community Arts Convening & Research Project has been extended to November 26, 2007. A brief five-sentence, 100-word abstract is required by November 26, followed by a 2-5 page preliminary text of the article (no later than December 1). These preliminary texts will be prescreened for suitability and posted on the Community Arts Convening project Web site with permission of the submitting author(s). No later than January 3, 2008, the Editorial Board will invite a selected group of authors to further develop their texts for presentation at the national convening in March 2008. See details and conference topics on the Web. [LINK]

Hoping to replicate Bilbao's "Guggenheim Effect," more than 200 cities have submitted proposals for Guggenheim Museums of their own, says Leslie Crawford on FT.com. "[E]very rust-belt city in North America and Europe wants to emulate Bilbao’s success," says Crawford. The Frank Gehry-designed museum in Bilbao, Spain, "turned a scrap-heap town into a destination for one million visitors a year. Over the past decade, people coming to see the museum have spent €1.6bn in the city and brought €260m of additional tax revenues." It also stirred redevelopment of other city areas and helps sustain 4,232 jobs. “We recovered our self-esteem,” says the Bilbao Guggenheim director. “Suddenly Bilbainos felt it was possible to reverse our trajectory of industrial decline.” Only one new Guggenheim is being built, in Guadalajara, Mex; Abu Dhabi is thinking about it. (thanks, Centre of Expertise on Culture and Communities.) [LINK]

The Finding Our Folk Tour is on the road this month with the HOT 8 Brass Band, visiting cities to which Hurricane Katrina survivors were displaced. The group's performances, workshops, exhibits, master classes and presentations aim to "use the tools of education, documentation, healing, and organizing to explore and discuss the conditions that led to the devastating impact of Katrina." Tour stops include the Black New World Social Aid and Pleasure Club and the Gathering for Justice National Convention in Oakland, Calif.; "Stardust and Empty Wagons -Stories from the Katrina Diaspora" at San Francisco's Brava Theater Center; the Coalition of Immokalee Workers March on Burger King, Miami; and appearances in New York City at Joe's Pub, the Lincoln Center Tree Lighting and Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts. Project documentation is on the Web. [LINK]

Public artist Brett Cook is in Durham, N.C., for a new community residency project called "Face Up: Telling Stories of Community Life." It will commission eight to ten large collaborative murals based on interviews with community members and research of historic persons and events in South Central Durham. The project will connect faculty, students, staff and local residents. Cook is in Durham for two weeks gathering participants and working on the first mural. His residency continues during winter/spring 2008, when he will live in Durham and teach a documentary public art course for Duke and UNC students. The project, including a gallery exhibit, a catalog and a Web site is sponsored by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and the Southwest Central Durham Quality of Life Project. [LINK]

A student video-production group has posted footage on YouTube of antiwar demonstrations that have been met with excessive force by the police in Olympia, Wash. Praxis Imago, the Digital Video Production group at the University of Puget Sound, filmed a peaceful demonstration by Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (OlyPMR) to stop the war in Iraq by preventing the movement of military equipment through the Port of Olympia. According to a report from United for Peace and Justice, demonstrators used their bodies to block convoys of Stryker combat vehicles from leaving the port for 17 hours and force a convoy back into the port. Police responded with batons, pepper bullets and pepper spray, often applied after removing demonstrators' protective goggles. OlyPMR will hold a large-scale demonstration November 17 to bring national attention to the situation. [LINK]

"Art + Activism= ARTIVISM," a community roundtable on November 17, 2007, is part of 8th annual Hecho en Califas Festival at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, Calif. Says La Peña: "With the current administration leading us further into debt, war and a society divided by class and race, these visionary voices give cause for reflection and provide a source of inspiration." The festival, through November 18, shows new Latin Alternative and hip-hop music, spoken word and theater by Latino artists from around the U.S., "daughters and sons of revolution and exile; first-generation immigrants; and diverse voices on the legacy of 'thangs taken' from Native Americans." Leaders from local social and environmental-justice organizations will "re-think" Thanksgiving, reflect on colonialism, and provide information on current campaigns and "concrete ways to take creative community action." [LINK]

Some changes are afoot in the PTO (Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed) organization, according to the announcement of its 14th annual conference, May 22-25, 2008. The conference, set in Omaha, Nebr., is themed "What is Change? What is Substantial Change? And How?" (Deadline for conference proposals is January 11, 2008.) This may be the last conference attended by Augusto Boal himself, as he is cutting back on his international travel; future conferences will likely be led by his son Julian. And Doug Paterson, PTO co-founder and board president, says on the Web that he and Carol Lloyd will reduce their time and organizational commitment to PTO, and the organization is in serious dialogues with educators, artists and activists in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., about the possibility of moving PTO's base from Omaha to that area. [LINK]

Today CAN brings you an essay by Jack Tchen titled "30 Years and Counting: A Context for Building a Shared Cross-Cultural Commons." The essay is based on a keynote speech Tchen delivered at “Sustaining Voices from the Battlefront: Community Grounded Cultural Arts Organizations @ 30,” a gathering convened by The Caribbean Cultural Center/African Diaspora Institute at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, June 8-9, 2007. The meeting was attended by leaders from community arts organizations grounded in various cultures, founded throughout the U.S. in the 1970s. Tchen responded to the conference preamble, which said, in part: "The struggle for cultural rights and cultural equity is linked to the struggle for political and economic rights and integral to the quest for human rights." He analyzes the recent "culture wars" in economic terms, cites the rise of "hypercapitalism," and invites his colleagues to join in a shared effort "to articulate a truly democratic and participatory alternative economic vision that puts our core concerns of freedom, justice and equity at the core of society." [LINK]

Tapeart.com is a remarkable Web site documenting the work of three public artists who create temporary, large-scale murals and installations for teaching and healing. Since 1989, The Tape Artists have worked using a special low-density tape in hospitals, schools and psychiatric institutes "looking to positively reinforce healthy processes." Notable are the site's sections on the Hope Project: work in Oklahoma after the 1995 Federal Building bombing, and in New York after 9/11, when they drew life-sized portraits of every lost airline passenger and fireman on the buildings of Manhattan. The figures held up fingers counting all 2,749 who died in the attack. The Web document, "Eleventh of September: an act of remembrance," uses innovative technologies (including Google maps) to compile five years of documentation and biographical information relating to the project and the people depicted. [LINK]

Cornerstone Theater Institute has some intensives in community-based theater coming up in December and February. The December one-day intensive includes eight hours of instruction and hands-on activities in the following topics: Cornerstone's history, evolution and case studies; theater and social change, Identifying & Engaging Community; and turning community stories into art (writing & design). Instructors are Artistic Director Michael John Garcés & Institute Director Paula Donnelly. The February 23-24 two-day intensive includes those same workshops, plus rehearsal and performance: tools & challenges; and collaborative composition & performance. Instructors are Donnelly and Associate Artistic Director Laurie Woolery. Reservations are limited. Call 213-613-1700 x34. [LINK]

The House is Small but the Welcome is Big is a documentary project exploring the impact of HIV/AIDS through the eyes of women and children in South Africa and Mozambique. The online and touring exhibition is a series of documentary photo stories by and about mothers and mothers-to-be living with HIV/AIDS, children orphaned by AIDS and raising their younger siblings, and teen “activistas” documenting the impact of AIDS on youth in their community. Artists from a Los Angeles-based organization, Venice Arts: In Neighborhoods, are in Mozambique teaching them how to tell their stories and document their lives and communities through photography. The interactive Web site features the women’s and children’s photographs, bios and video interviews, plus mentors’ and photographers’ blogs. The site allows users to comment, download podcasts and videos, and subscribe. [LINK]

Is there any way to build cross-"race" and cross-class relations through cultural work in a city as diverse as Los Angeles? Strategies and approaches will be explored in a community discussion at 18th Street Arts Center, November 10, 2007, following "Curating Across the North-South Divide," a talk by independent Danish curator Tone Olaf Nielsen on curating across boundaries of nation, "race," class, gender and sexuality. A co-founding member of the artist-curator collective Goll & Nielsen and the curatorial collective Kuratorisk Aktion, Nielsen’s methodology stresses the sociopolitical dimension of curatorial work and "its potential to promote positive social change through the transformative process of acquiring new objects of knowledge." Neilsen's recent projects have considered intolerance in Denmark and "the North-South Divide." The talk/discussion is organized by The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest and PATRIOT ACTS @ The Habeas Lounge. [LINK]

Proposals are due November 15, 2007, for presentations at MICA's March 2008 Community Arts Convening & Research Project. Writers selected to present at the convening will receive feedback from the project Editorial Board in the months leading up to the convening. A deliberate effort will be made to cultivate presentations by a diverse group of community arts theorists and practitioners with the goal of initiating publication (on CAN) of the best thinking from all groups of individuals who are shaping the field. Convening topics include: empowering the voice of communities by tapping community resources and history; developing models for training, reciprocal learning and participatory research; arts-based community building and advocacy; documenting the evolution of the field and best practices in community arts; and building new partnerships and leveraging resources. Details on the Web. [LINK]

"Political Equator II" is the second conference in a series that explores many sociological, ecological and political borders, moving from California to Baja California. November 16-17, 2007, a collective of architects and urbanists offer "a provocative series of events and interventions ... hosted by major cultural institutions, neighborhood-based NGOs,and independent alternative spaces, eventually crossing over into the no-man’s -and of the border zone itself, where the Tijuana River symbolizes the conflicts these collaborative practices seek to expose and engage." They include a conversation on a train, a Table of Collaboration, a "front" at the activist border artspace Casa Familliar, a border crossing, a lecture on the "planetary garden" at the Tijuana River, and a global border-zone conversation at Centro Cultural Tijuana. The convenors are Teddy Cruz + Grant Kester with Denise Bratton, Eloisa Haudenschild + Steve Fagin, and Carmen Cuenca. [LINK]

The Bill of Rights was read aloud recently at Santa Monica's Habeas Lounge, part of 18th St. Arts Center's new season devoted to the 2008 Presidential election. 18th Street’s exhibition year theme is “The Future of Nations,” focusing on four areas: the Constitution; demographics; environments; and war as a way of life, each area with its own curator. The first project, already underway, is "Patriot Acts," bringing together artists, lawyers, activists, students, scholars and former military personnel. It's curated by Linda Pollack, who, with a team of 12 artists, met all summer with legal experts to explore Habeas Corpus, the USA PATRIOT ACT, California primaries, voting education and more. Events in the project's Habeas Lounge include a voter registration drive, a college poll-worker recruitment push, public discussions/events on pressing constitutional issues and an exhibition January-March 2008. [LINK]

What is failure when we integrate the arts into correctional education? asked John Curtis, assistant principal at Island Academy on Rikers Island, N.Y. His question is answered on NYFA (N.Y. Foundation for the Arts) Chalkboard by artist/educator Dale Davis, executive director of the New York State Literary Center, with 28 years of experience with arts in incarceration programs. The two educators met at a steering committee meeting of the newly-formed N.Y. State Arts In Correctional Education Network. Davis modified Curtis' question: How do we measure results? His answer: documentation. "By documenting the experiences of students," says Davis, "we begin to give a clearer picture of the students’ attendance, ability to make positive choices, academic engagement, follow-through on assignments, use of language, classroom behavior and participation and social skills." [LINK]

"Weather Report: Art and Climate Change" is an exhibition in Boulder, Colo., through December 21, 2007, part of Ecoarts, an extraordinary calendar of events this fall. The exhibit, curated by Lucy Lippard, features collaborations between artists and scientists "intent on creating a visual dialogue about climate change and enlightening and empowering audiences with a vision for a sustainable future. " Issues include desertification, floods, changing watersheds, global warming, renewable energy, carbon profiling, reforestation, species transformation and more. The sponsor, Ecoarts, is a cross-sector coalition of some 20 major science, arts, environmental, educational and other organizations and institutions that also presented across Colorado this fall: a gathering of indigenous leaders, science workshops, sustainable living expos, performances, talks, fairs, feasts and parades, plus tours of solar homes, culinary gardens, science exhibits, coal-fired power plants, wind turbines and more. [LINK]

New York City schoolchildren are handing out 80,000 flowers throughout the city today, November 1, 2007, to raise awareness of their public art project, Garden in Transit. 23,000 children in schools and hospitals have painted 80,000 flowers on 750,000 square feet of adhesive panels for a four-month public art exhibition featured on taxis citywide. The project was originated in 2000 by two brothers, Ed and Bernie Massey, who say, "Using our 1" brushes as a base, the GIT participants have painted the equivalent of a 1" straight line from NYC to Vail, Colorado, a distance of more than 1,700 miles." During the process, the children participated in civic educational sessions, led by the Massey's Portraits of Hope initiative, about the environment, education, senior care, national security, ethnic relations, healthcare, women's equality, medical research, foreign aid, poverty and animal rights. Lots more on the Web. [LINK]

Six hundred leaves incised with peace wishes and the sacred Sanskrit syllable Om were floated on the Chicago River by dozens of canoeists, October 6, 2007. The artwork, "Where Sky Meets Water," initiated by Indian-born artist Indira Freitas Johnson as an offering for peace, is rooted in the South Asian tradition where offerings of leaves and flowers are sent out into the rivers and seas from China to Japan, Bali to India. "I wanted to engage local communities in the various aspects of the project: planning, gathering leaves, incising symbols that are meaningful to them and finally, to come together in a culminating ritual that allowed the leaves to float away with the tide and the wind," says Johnson. She and community members spent two years preparing the leaves. [LINK]

Sundance Institute and the Skoll Foundation recently announced a $3-million partnership dedicated to exploring film's role in advancing knowledge about social entrepreneurship. The grant will support the launch of Stories of Change: Social Entrepreneurship in Focus through Documentary, an initiative of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program. The partnership includes annual convenings of social entrepreneurs and filmmakers; film project grants; audience expansion; online networking resources; collaboration and exchange of information, knowledge and expertise; and case studies to frame and shape social entrepreneurs and film/media makers approach creative concept development. Skoll says the new cross-sector initiative will help "advance the innovative approaches found in both fields." The Skoll Foundation, created in 1999 eBay president Jeff Skoll, advances systemic change to benefit communities around the world by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs. [LINK]