In 2019 SXSW teamed up with Neil Pasricha to host a conversation about trust in contemporary society. To kick off this conversation, they commissioned Adjacent Possibilities to create a visual essay to provoke a conversation.

In their mission to transform the future of food in healthcare Nourish needed a tool to capture the attention of senior leadership in healthcare institutions. They commissioned Adjacent Possibilities to create a visual manifesto that would capture the complex vision of Nourish and deliver it in a short, impactful format.

We centred our storytelling around hospital tray, a colourful, iconic and yet often derided artifact that serves as the backdrop for a story of systems transformation.

What does hospital food have to do with reconciliation? We teamed up with the Greenbelt Fund and Nourish Health to profile Kathy Loon, an Ojibway hunter from the Slate Falls reserve who is working with the Sioux Lookout Meno Ya Win Health Centre to bring traditional Indigenous foods onto the menu.

Action Canada is a leadership program for the next generation of policymakers. To fulfill their mission they must recruit the brightest minds from every corner of Canada. Our brief was to create a pithy introduction video that captured the organizaitonal ethos and attracted the best candidates to apply.

The Canadian Race Relations Foundation (CRRF) travels across the country to host conversations about race in communities experiencing endemic racism.

While these community consultations contain rich stories, it can be hard for those outside the room to appreciate the complexities of institutionalized racism. CRRF asked Adjacent Possibilities for help to illustrate the issues to a digital audience so we hooked up with Rodney Small to help him tell his story about the trials and tribulations of growing up while black.

The Turtle Island Institute (TII) believes that reawakening ancestral ways of knowing is central to creating positive social change. To accompany the organization’s public launch and communicate its vision, TII wanted to show its audiences Indigenous-lead social innovation and examples of how non-Indigenous people can engage with Indigenous knowledge in a good way.

TII invited Adjacent Possibilities to join the second of four Gikendaasowin workshops to tell the story of Elders, knowledge keepers and Indigenous innovators examining the relationships between traditional teachings and systems thinking and social change.

“The Gikendaasowin video is very well done, so clear, straightforward and eloquent. Well done to all those involved.”
- Tim Brodhead (former President and CEO of McConnell, Trudeau Foundation President, SiG Senior Fellow)

For more than 45 years, L’Arche Toronto has enriched the lives of individuals with intellectual disabilities and supported them to achieve their goals for a meaningful life.

Their Everyone Belongs campaign aims to build a new home in Regent park that will provide a fully-accessible, barrier-free and inclusive lifestyle for their Core Members.

When we think of inclusion, we often only think of the beneficiaries being the members who were once excluded but now included. But the reality is that the Returns on Inclusion go far beyond that. L’Arche believes inclusive communities are better for everyone, not just people with intellectual disabilities. To communicate this idea, we worked with them to develop a brand platform with "Return on Inclusion" or “ROI”.

At the beginning of 2017, the McConnell Foundation began rebranding their foundation, aiming to create an identity that was more approachable. As part of this effort McConnell set out to distill their complex theory of change into a message that was clear and engaged audiences. Adjacent Possibilities created a campaign called Countless Rebellions that flipped the conventional idea of a theory of change on its head. Instead of an explanatory video, we hosted a conversation with 19 of McConnell’s community members and presented their ideas about the nature of social change through a visual manifesto.

The Canadian Centre for the Ethics in Sport (CCES) developed the Succeed Clean program to educate and help young athletes make informed and healthy decisions about Appearance and Performance Enhancing Drugs (APEDs). The CCES hired AP to extend the reach of their prevention program through a film that targeted young athletes.

We created three films featuring three different types of athletes. Using personal narratives we illuminated the inner psyche of young athletes struggling with APEDs. This first person point of view helped to authentically represent the targeted audience’s experiences.

Every two years, Community Foundations of Canada (CFC) convenes hundreds of philanthropic leaders from across the country for a conference in a city somewhere in Canada. In 2021, the CFC will work with The Toronto Foundation to host the conference in Canada’s largest city.

To set the stage for the event, the Toronto Foundation engaged Adjacent Possibilities to create an anthem for the event that would capture the city’s heartbeat, express the Foundation’s new vision for philanthropy, and inspire attendees to engage with the conference themes.

VO by Tanika Charles, Juno Award and Polaris Prize-nominated Toronto R&B/Soul singer

https://tanikacharles.com.

Client Website: www.communityfoundations.ca

Producer: Ross Curtner

Cinematographer: Nickoloz Kachibaia

Voice Over Artist: Tanika Charles

Editor: Kevin Luttman

The City of Toronto, in close partnership with Metrolinx and the TTC, was undertaking a Work Program to refine the Eglinton East LRT and advance it to procurement. To generate excitement for the project and promote engagement from residents and other stakeholders, AP was hired to communicate the community, economic and city building opportunities of the project through a short film.

AP assisted in narrowing the film audience to youth living in the EELRT corridor. To target this demographic, well-known local spoken word artist Randell Adjei created a vocal narrative to accompany vibrant and quick paced visuals of local hot spots and people.

Sport’s benefits are numerous: from improving our health and fitness, to increasing our sense of belonging, to making our communities more inclusive and resilient. Community Foundations of Canada and the True Sport Foundation hired Adjacent Possibilities to communicate the impact that local sport programs have on community development to help stimulate new investment in the sector.

Women’s economic empowerment is about more than helping women attain employment: meaningful economic empowerment requires addressing the systemic social, cultural, political, and economic barriers that women face in accessing opportunities. Through the Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) program, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)-supported researchers are strengthening understandings of how gender functions in the economy to enable the implementation of evidence-based social and economic policies that contribute to women’s economic empowerment.

The IDRC sought to complement their research findings with a film series that depicted a vivid, on-the-ground perspective of women’s daily lives. AP created three films in Kenya, Pakistan and Bangladesh that illustrated both the complex barriers women faced, but also the resilience, strength and ingenuity that they brought to these challenges. At the core of each film are three women’s voices, drawing audiences into their intimate and emotionally raw journeys.

By 2040, Toronto will add 600,000 new residents to its population and while it may seem obvious that these people will need housing, it's not always obvious where this housing ought to go. Suburbanization, densification and redevelopment all come with drawbacks but critics don’t always consider the larger picture with which city planners must contend. The City Planning division engaged Adjacent Possibilities to contextualize Toronto’s planning dialogue within the reality of rapid population growth and share some of the trade-offs that planners must consider every day. By using basic wood blocks, we were able to help Torontonians consider how their local block fits into the bigger picture.

Origin Capital seeks to create a new breed of social finance products focused on fighting inequality. Launching as the title sponsor for the Social Finance Forum, Origin Capital needed to bring their audiences into an emotional connection with their brand and create a visually compelling brand launch on their digital channels. They hired Adjacent Possibilities to develop a creative approach that could bring new life into their existing media library and tell their brand’s story with a distinct visual language.

The Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund (OCAF) invests a small amount of public money so cultural events can market to audiences that will bring dollars to Ontario’s arts and cultural tourism sectors. However, given the complexity of their model and the saturated landscape of arts funding organizations, important stakeholders often failed to understand their unique value proposition. OCAF engaged Adjacent Possibilities to cut to their core purpose and show how OCAF bring out crowds.

Musagetes is concerned with the role the arts can play in addressing the faultlines of modern society. When they presented us with this provocation we decided to look at the faultlines in our backyard.

Between Paper and Concrete is an artistic inquiry into the history of housing in the Greater Toronto Area, and how these legacies affect the lives of Torontonians today. We teamed up with photographer and podcast duo Gilad Cohen and Taha Muharuma to create a multi-generational, multi-media story about what housing means to us. Check out the project on Musagetes’ “Arts Everywhere” platform. artseverywhere.ca/paper-concrete

Building Up is a non-profit social enterprise that trains and employs people in trades who face barriers to employment. Their work makes clear that with a small investment in their retrofit services – and in fact the equivalent amount of money normally spent on retrofit services – you can make a profound impact in someone’s life. Faced with the challenge of communicating their impact to potential funders and clients, Building Up brought on Adjacent Possibilities to tell their story through the lives of the people they work with. The result? Calvin’s Story, detailing the immense difference Building Up has made in Calvin’s life, in Calvin’s words. 

As anyone in the Greater Toronto Hamilton Area (GTHA) can attest, transportation plays a major role in our lives. In 2017, Metrolinx engaged 36 residents from the GTHA to bring their perspective and help design the next 25 years of transportation in the region. To give others a glimpse into this unique democratic process, Adjacent Possibilities created a short documentary that tells the stories of three residents and their journey into the depths of transportation policymaking.

Rapid media cycles and superficial coverage of planning decisions make it difficult for the public to gain a full picture of factors that go into various planning projects, making planners vulnerable to simplistic criticism. The Honest Ed’s development has been particularly contentious with Torontonians. The City of Toronto Planning Division hired AP to create a video that took the public ‘beyond the headlines’ of the Honest Ed’s site. AP employed one of the City Planners of the site to explain the process behind the planning of the new Honest Ed’s site and how public opinion was taken into consideration.

art+energy was a first of its kind exhibition, showcasing the works of three artists (Li-Hill, LeuWebb Projects, and MAKELAB) responding to a call to creatively showcase the possibilities being developed to address climate disruption by leading entrepreneurs in the cleantech energy sector (Morgan Solar, Hydrostor and MMB Networks). Three curatorial documentaries take the audience into the discovery process as the artists explore themes of inspiration, determination and human innovation.

The Methodology

Adjacent Possibilities selected artists and cleantech entrepreneurs based on vision, ingenuity and passion, guiding them through a learning process about each other’s creative practice. Site tours, facilitated dialogue and artistic play helped participants cross disciplinary boundaries, build relationships and create art about the future of energy.
 

The Spectacle

At the sold-out opening to the exhibition, the MaRS heritage atrium was filled with a diverse audience from government, arts, entrepreneurial, and corporate sectors. The event fostered emotional connection to climate disruption and deep thinking about adjacent possibilities of art and energy.
 

"It was a really lovely and uplifting event, and you could feel a great amount of good energy unleashed on the world. For me the best part was real convergence (or unique pairs of convergence) of the artists and their art, with the innovators and their brilliant technologies and large dreams. Nothing about that synergy was contrived. They all gained. Well done! We look forward to the next instalment.”
- Dr. Ilse Treurnicht, CEO MaRS Discovery District