I just got back from a meeting of Creative Juice at the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce. The group, chaired by Kid City's Jen Alexander and Green Street Arts Center's Jani Astor del Valle, meets once a month over brown bag lunches to get creative thinkers thinking together.
Today's topic was how travel helps inspire creativity, during which the group members shared experiences, and travel tales.
We heard stories of travel with foreign visitors on an American road trip, posing with pandas in China, visiting the leper colony in Hawaii, discovering hidden falls in the American West, hitting the road in India, discovering nature in Rhode Island and dancing and eating in Louisiana.
And despite the rather pedestrian surroundings of the Chamber's basement conference room (I bump my head on the ceiling each and every time I'm there), we were all able to escape, for a lunchtime, to some exotic clime via the stories of our creative colleagues.For more information about Creative Juice, contact Cathy Duncan at the Chamber: Cathy@middlesexchamber.com.
I believe the meeting room in the basement of the Chamber is one of the yuckiest spaces I've ever been in. Until meetings are held in a more uplifting space, I truly believe few new or inspirational ideas will be borne, and the Chamber will not ever be as effective as it could be. There are BALLROOMS downtown that can be renovated or just simply leased for meetings. They can (in turn) be rented for offered for community meetings. If the Chamber can't look at things in a new way, how could anyone expect a new business owner to be attracted to downtown?
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