What do you hope to achieve this year?

Cassandra | Te Tai Poutini

Cassandra believes in the power of art to help individuals and communities understand themselves and grow.

“You know when you’re young and people say “what do you want to be when you grow up?” And I always thought “what a stupid question” or “what a confusing question” and surely the only answer is that you want to be happy.

School didn’t really work for me. I left quite young and got involved in arts and community when I was quite young. I’ve worked in mental health, and we used the arts there to help heal people. I was trying to be happy and figure out what happiness means. And of course, happiness is quite complex; it means a lot of things.

Some of the things that it seems to be intertwined with are community and arts, at least for me. I’ve always worked in the community, and I’ve always worked with the arts. I believe in the transformational power of the arts and what it means for communities. The arts help us get to know ourselves, and that creates the shift – that’s the transformation.

When I talk about what you want to be when you grow up, it’s to be happy. The arts is one of the sure-fire ways to learn who you are, and you can head toward that happiness. A community can do that too. A community can transform itself from one thing to another through the arts and become the kind of community it wants to be.”