Leading through giving and collaborating: Considerations for socially engaged arts-based practice and collaborative leadership

This article considers how arts-based and other practices inform creative leadership capacities. This consideration is grounded primarily in a reflection on previous work of artists and their colleagues on the production, advocacy and education of colloidal silver-enhanced ceramic water filters as a response to the global water crisis. Central to this reflection is consideration of how this work informs creative leadership capacities through theoretical lenses of collaborative leadership, socially engaged practice and art practice as giving. Ultimately, the intention is to suggest that creative leadership as praxis takes form through cultural production beyond object-making, favouring the facilitation of meaningful relationships among people, ideas and contexts, as they arise from collaboration and social engagement.