The Create Trust is a UK registered charity, number 1115157
Mission Statement: Enable fundamental change in the lives of acutely disadvantaged women and children, through education, creative thinking and social development.
Background
The Create Trust was set up in March 2005 when the founder Graham Peebles, was asked to run a series of creative education workshops in Sri Lanka for communities affected by the South-east Asia tsunami.
In addition to working in Sri Lanka, we have run projects in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Ethiopia, where Graham spent two years and India, where we are currently working.
At the heart of our work is a belief in the power of the creative process to liberate, inspire and heal. We run a range of education projects and social development schemes with local partners: Creative Education Programmes using all forms of visual and performance art, including community theatre; English language projects; Training Programmes for teachers, social/care workers and parents; vocational training schemes and health care projects.
Teacher/Parent Training Outline
There are a great many problems facing humanity, both individually and collectively and of course the two are not separate. Throughout the world the importance of education as a means, perhaps the means, of solving our difficulties is increasingly recognised.
Educational reform is under discussion in many countries: ‘new’ creative ways of teaching, a greater understanding of our-selves and by extension of the student’s in our care is required. Creative thinking, allowing teachers to deliver subjects in stimulating ways that inspire and energize students, instilling hope and self belief are essential if the children of today are to find within themselves the resources needed to re-shape society.
Creative thinking, we could say is, thinking freed from conditioning; it is an expansive movement of the mind in which intelligence flowers naturally. An intelligence unrestricted by the limitations of knowledge based upon tradition, culture, ideology, religious or political dogma – conditioning.
An intelligence which has its roots in Love, not sentimental love, nor a transient emotional feeling which we mistakenly name as love, but rather that universal state of being which makes itself felt when the noise of the self is no more. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, Love is our goal.
All involved should approach the programme in the spirit of mutual investigation. For their to be significant educational development, the teachers themselves at all levels need to strengthen their understanding of themselves and consequently of those in their care, it has been said that it is in fact ‘the teachers who need teaching’ in order for the students to appropriately learn. This programme is an attempt to aid in that process.
The programme should be seen as an opportunity for group enquiry, the only authority in such an endeavor should be the authority of mutual understanding. For there to be sustained fundamental change within society the attitudes of those who make up the society need to develop, the training programmes we are formulating are an attempt to support that movement and, as a group to discover a new method of meeting the needs of the most vulnerable members of our society.
“Take your brothers need as the measure for your actions and solve the problems of the World.” Maitreya
graham peebles 