The Healing Revolution is Creative- and it's already Here

(photo taken by Aaron Nesheim, Sahan Journal January 7, 2026)

There are moments when a community is bruised, breath knocked out, trust shaken. In those moments, spreadsheets and slogans won’t save us. What does? Care. Courage. Creativity. The kind that listens before it speaks and builds before it argues. The kind that knows how to hold grief without rushing it away—and how to turn anger into action.

This is not soft work. It is brave work.

This is the ground where creative leadership lives.

At Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), creative leadership is not a brand; it’s a practice. It begins with a simple, radical posture: people first. It asks who has been harmed, who has been unheard, and how we can co-create systems that repair rather than repeat oppression.

And it matters—especially here in Minneapolis.

To live and work in Minneapolis is to know that place carries memory. This city has endured repeated, public, visible, and devastating harm. Yet, Minneapolis residents have responded not with vengeance, but with creative presence. Residents answer oppression with art—not as decoration, but as direction.

When grief spills into our streets, artists help us stay. Murals became mirrors. Songs became sanctuaries. Public spaces become classrooms for collective learning, where sorrow, anger, love, and resolve are allowed to coexist. In Powderhorn and beyond, neighbors gather in circles—some with paintbrushes, some with drums, some simply with open hands. Creative placemaking turns fear into fellowship, strangers into stewards. These aren’t performances. They are practices of democracy.

This is what human-centered, creative leadership looks like in the wild: creating hospitable spaces where the soul of a community can show up. Presence alone is not enough. Once we have gathered, once we have listened, we must also ask how the systems around us either support or suffocate that life. Once we do, we can’t unsee the truth- systems shape what survives.

Design justice is how we respond—not as a theory, but as a practice and a way of life.

Design justice invites us to slow down and ask different questions:
Who is being harmed by this system? Who has been unheard? What changes when we design with rather than for?

Human-centered leadership carries these questions inward. It recognizes that institutions, like people, carry trauma—stored in policies, hierarchies, habits, and unspoken rules. Healing them cannot be rushed or imposed. It requires practices that restore dignity, agency, and trust.

MCAD’s approach insists that leadership is not about control—it is about stewardship. It is about tending the conditions where creativity can metabolize pain into purpose. As healing wisdom reminds us: we don’t rush the process; we listen for what wants to emerge.

Artists are trained to sit with uncertainty. They know how to compost despair into meaning. They work with the body, with intuition, with story. When communities are assaulted—physically, politically, spiritually—it is artists who help us remember who we are and what still belongs to us.

At MCAD, this remembering is not abstract, it is taught. Creative leadership pedagogy begins with pause before prescribing solutions, listening before designing, and understanding systems as a living, relational ecology rather than mechanical structures to control. Leadership, in this frame, is not about authority or performance. It is about responsibility and relationship. Students are taught to slow down, to notice power dynamics, and to co-create with-not for- the communities they serve. Success is not measured by speed or scale, but by trust built, voices centered, and whether the work leaves people and places more connected than before.

From this stance, regenerative economics emerges, not as a financial model, but as a leadership practice. Regeneration asks: does this system give back more than it takes? Does it strengthen relationships and circulate value locally? Does it support long-term care rather than short-term extraction? These are not economic questions alone; it is what ethical leadership looks like in action.

Here is what you can do in your community

1. Listen before action
   Host open gatherings where the first act is listening without fixing. Grief and truth need to be seen without being fixed. This builds safety. Safety precedes strategy. Always.
2. Design with, not for
   Put resources behind co-creation. Let go of ego and share authorship. Justice grows when power is redistributed with humility.
3. Commit to expression as an ongoing practice
   Pair creative expression with tangible next steps: mutual aid hubs, policy conversations, business collaborations. Healing is not an event; it is an ongoing rhythm.

We have seen this path before. History confirms what our bodies already know:

• During the Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1920s) art reclaimed dignity and reimagined possibility amid systemic racial terror and economic exclusion.
• In Chile (1980s), women stitched truth into cloth when words were too dangerous to speak under dictatorship, preserving memory and mobilizing resistance in a quilt known as the arpilleras
• In Berlin (Germany, 1990s), art transformed the Wall from a symbol of division into a living archive of freedom and reconciliation.

History keeps telling us the same thing, art organizes hope and policy follows. Creative leaders don’t flinch. We stay present. We make room for tears—and then build something better. At MCAD we design with care. We lead with humility. We stand unarmored in the face of injustice and build systems that heal rather than harm. This is the healing revolution. It is tender, yet fierce. It won’t be televised. It will be painted, sung, designed, and co-owned. You will know it when you see it because it looks like neighbors making meaning together- right here, right now. Will you be joining us?