Why the world needs your creativity

Through the creative lens

The name of Moleskine will be familiar to those with creative leanings – it’s the Italian brand behind those luxury notebooks loved by writers and artists. The company’s founder (and creator of the notebooks) Maria Sebregondi set up what is now called the Moleskine Foundation in 2006 to support culture organizations.

Sanneh has led the foundation since 2019, and in 2021 he launched its Creativity Pioneers Fund, which invests in projects around the world that pursue unconventional solutions to big global challenges.

Creativity – that quality of breathing life into original ideas and expressions – is in all of us, Sanneh believes. It’s not so much a skill or a practice as a “posture”, he says, “a way through which you see everything else”. 

Sadly, not everyone gets the chance to indulge their creative side – and that’s what Sanneh wants to change.

Releasing the world’s untapped creativity is a noble goal for its own sake, because creative is so “fundamental” to being human, says Sanneh. But he also believes it can yield concrete, measurable benefits, and new ways to tackle the biggest challenges of our time, including climate change.

“We live in the era of creativity,” Sanneh says. “What we learned yesterday is obsolete tomorrow. So it’s not knowledge that makes the difference anymore, it’s learning and relearning. Especially now in the moment of AI… we need to stay attached to our humanity, to double down on our humanity.”

Unfortunately, says Sanneh, “These kinds of human characteristics have been squashed by society, by the education system and so on. Because we thought as a society, that in the name of efficiency and… growth, there were other features that were more important.” And while chasing greater productivity can achieve some things, the multiple challenges that humanity faces today seem to call for other approaches.

How humans work

Sanneh is far from alone in thinking this way. He increasingly sees creativity celebrated in spaces where it might once have been seen as fluffy or irrelevant. “You can’t imagine how many people, even CEOs at a very high level, hide their creative practices for the first 30 years of their career,” he says. “I’ve had [senior] people tell me about their creative practice and be like, ‘I just realized it’s the first time I’ve said this.’”

When Sanneh launched the Creativity Pioneers Fund, instead of reaching for a quote from an artist or philosopher, he talked about Jack Ma, the cofounder of Chinese ecommerce giant Alibaba, who told the World Economic Forum that we need to teach our kids ‘soft skills’ like music and painting. And when the men in suits in Davos start preaching creativity, you know something is changing.

Could the creative posture even help us overcome the climate crisis? After all, “if climate change were only an issue of numbers, then it would have been solved in the early 2000s,” says Sanneh. “It’s not that we need other data. We have all the data!” He paraphrases former Amnesty International boss Kumi Naidoo saying his generation had failed on climate by believing that information alone would be enough to spark action: “We were so fixated on giving you the facts about why we were right, we forgot how humans work.”

The idea of the Creativity Pioneers Fund is to support projects that are underpinned by a stronger sense of “how humans work”. In Italy there’s T-12 Lab, which works with urban communities to reclaims unused and run-down spaces, and uses design to regenerate them. In Chad there’s Knock On Art, which supports artists doing work inspired by nature. One of Sanneh’s favorite projects is Sunshine Cinema – a mobile, solar-powered open-air movie theater that brings African movies to disconnected communities across the south of the continent.

It’s important to remember that you can’t force creativity, says Sanneh. “The only thing you can do is contribute to an environment in which things might happen.” Jail Time Records is one example of such a space – one where things certainly have happened, and continue to happen.

This is why Sanneh rolls his eyes whenever he hears that old cliche, ‘You shouldn’t give a man a fish, you should teach him how to fish.’ “No,” he says. “You should create an environment in which that man can decide whatever the hell he wants to do! Maybe it’s fishing. Maybe it’s growing flowers. Maybe it’s writing poetry. Maybe it something else. But that has nothing to do with you!”

The more of us are exploring our creativity, the better, Sanneh believes, and the more varied and unexpected the projects that the fund can support, the better. 

I ask if there is any one of the fund’s initiatives that has particularly surprised him. He pauses for a moment, then says, “almost every one”.