I was thrilled to team up with Shawn Gallaway last week – Oct 30 –  to produce the “Uniting Creatives with Love & Vitality” concert!   It was fun to find a way to support social change not only through intentional social media, but through music and the healing arts!  Here is an outstanding article that was written by one of the attendees: http://www.examiner.com/sustainable-agriculture-in-seattle/cynthia-duval about how it affected her!

Another version of the article was written by Cynthia for Biznik.com.  It reads like this:

Bizniker Joy Gilfilen uses a creative promotions strategy to launch UnitingCreatives.com and change the world

In this article I tell you about the concert and film shoot featuring Shawn Gallaway that fellow Biznik entrepreneur Joy Gilfilen and collaborators organized to promote her new venture UnitingCreatives.com.

Singer songwriter Shawn Gallaway was in Bellingham, Washington this past week to celebrate the launch of Joy Glfilen’s start-up company UnitingCreatives. He sang a concert of 15 songs in front of a small and enthusiastic crowd of supporters at The Conway Muse, an old barn turned eclectic performing and visual arts center/ meeting place in Conway, WA. Local film company AnchorLight Productions filmed the show that will be featured on Gilfilen’s UnitingCreatives.com website.

Gallaway is well known for his inspired song “I Choose Love” from his album of the same name. The song is both artistic expression and tool Gallaway uses to rally his audiences to the message that we can use personal intent to move from a state of fear to a state of collective love. He believes that changing your thinking to focus on positive emotions like love and joy brings love and joy into your life and the world. You can download a free MP3 file of I Choose Love from Gallaway’s website (see link below.)

Gallaway sang 14 other songs in an order that told his story of personal spiritual awakening. Between songs he told the crowd how “going deep” into himself through spiritual practice freed his artistic potential and helped him discover his purpose in life as a man and an artist. He bravely exposed his inner life and journey to view and earned the hearts of the audience in return. He sang The Calling, When I Let Go, Choice Point, The Wind is Always and ended his set with the title song from his soon to be released album Living Love Tonight. If The Wind is Always is on the album, I’ll buy it. It’s a simple and poetic folk song that I definitely want to hear again.

The audience was invited to sing along often and the overall experience was an unusual cross between a folk music concert, monastic chanting, a ceremonial rite of passage, edutainment for change agents and a celebration for volunteers for a job well done; I smiled through most of the event.

Gilfilen’s UnitingCreatives.com is an idea coming to fruition after a long gestation period during which she has been solidifying her systems approach and philosophy about how personal and social change happens. Gilfilen has been writing and produced a DVD called Flipping the Joy Switch in which she introduces her audience to simple tools for building emotional intelligence, a type of intelligence that enables people to manage instead of be managed by emotions.

Joy is an advocate for using joyful intent as a means for protecting and preserving the earth for future generations; she and Gallaway and a large and growing number of change agents around the world share this quantum physics inspired approach to social change. A self-proclaimed hippy who was there at the beginning of the New Age movement Gilfilen has been working steadily to teach the world how to achieve peace and joy; with her new company she intends to take her message to another level by empowering others to find and support each other and do more together than they can do alone.

The Uniting Creatives website is being designed and built by local artist and entrepreneur Tenzing Kernan and company at TKWeb. The on-line service targets “people creating communities, projects and events that change the world.” The purpose of the site is to support a social change community of artist/entrepreneurs by providing an on-iine forum for sharing projects and events and finding collaborators and supporters. The site will feature an e-commerce engine to facilitate sale of products and services to generate life preserving revenue so that artists and other creative types can do their humanitarian work and take care of their families too.

You can sign up for free to experiment with the “alpha” site at http://www.unitingcreatives.com. The web team is hard at work getting design revisions and user experiences fixes in place and the refreshed site will go live soon. I look forward to using the site myself and can’t wait to see the finished design. Watch for more to come from the collaborations that will be empowered by UnitingCreatives.com as creatives unite.

Links:
JoyGilfilen.com
ShawnGallaway.com
UnitingCreatives.com
AnchorLightProductions.com
TKWeb.com

I think Joy did an excellent job of honoring her collaborators and volunteers and making the most out of her marketing and promotions dollars.  Win-Win-Win is written all over this particular event and the message she is putting out to the world is one that can’t hurt anyone and just may help in a big way.

Cynthia DuVal - DuVal Ethnographic Research Center & Change Agency

Working with Shawn Gallaway to produce this workshop was a true celebration of life!  Not necessarily a simple process, it was nonetheless rewarding on many levels.  We were empowered to notice how differently men and women experience their own masculine and feminine natures through our own expressions.

And then to be able to see how our reactions and “pre-judgements” affects how we are reactive and responsive in life.  Then, to notice how the conflicts we create inside ourselves ripples out to affect our friends, families and business relationships!  Learning to release resistance and to work with our changing natures made for a superb seminar!

Wow!  What a week!  Oct 23 UnitingCreatives.com sponsored a trendsetting conference here in Bellingham with Singer-Songwriter Shawn Gallaway performing empowerment music for business and social change agents!  Plus 14 business speakers talking about how social media is affecting commerce and our educational and political worlds.  Social media is growing up fast as a platform for supporting global change and upending old ways of doing business!

A keynote speech  by Marcia Johnson, set us up for listening in an all new way.  Co-Founder of PeaceinourLifetime.org, Marcia talked about the size and scope of social media as a phenomenon that is making our world very small.  We taped the whole thing…so parts of it will start to show up on UnitingCreatives.com in our live event stream video blog.  Check it out and watch some snippets!