Emma Rushton is Kindred’s lead for Young Ideas. She is developing a programme which includes a series of events and interventions to introduce young people to the idea of the social economy. The programme, called IDEAS WORK, fosters ideas, looks at the work it takes to make an idea happen, questions what is work, whether there are alternative models and why, behind the most common question posed to a child ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’, is the assumption ‘what job will you do to pay the bills?’
Emma also works with our socially-trading organisations, collating feedback from annual reviews, regular check-ins with investees to see what support individual organisations need to keep going, to sustain or grow.
Emma is an artist, with a history of exhibiting around the world and developing large scale projects and has also worked in higher education on Fine Art courses for 25+ years. Her art projects involve collaboration and part of her individual and collaborative practice is to invite others – artists, theorists, curators, writers, activists, musicians, economists, unionists, members of the public, to contribute to or participate in her work. Her passion as artist and educator is giving people space, and an audience – however small – to shine.
Seeing her two children, seven years apart, through an education system which increasingly puts young people in boxes, has led her to design IDEAS WORK around cardboard boxes, as an adaptable waste material. The aim is not to ‘think outside the box’ – but to take the box apart and make it into something else.
For many years, Emma was a parent governor at the school her children attended in Moss Side, Manchester – a multicultural area then described as ‘serving an area of considerable economic and social disadvantage’, which twice won Times Education Awards during this time, for its innovation in pupil enterprise, its strong community and its policy of local parent employment.
“Giving space for creative expression, risk taking and subversion enables what we would call an entrepreneurial space, and I lead by example,” she says. “Young people should be allowed space to express themselves where the emphasis isn’t on reward or achievement, but is simply on the pleasure of doing, of creating, coming up with solutions, engineering, problem solving for themselves. Spaces need to be created, even if only a small space or period, for people to misalign, to go against the grain, to be rebellious, to do the unexpected, or we will have no entrepreneurs, especially social ones, for our future, at a time when we are going to need them most.”
Emma is also founder of art-in. a small social enterprise in its infancy.