Creative Rising is a principal-led strategy, facilitation and organizational learning practice working across arts and culture, nonprofit and community organizations, higher education and public institutions.
Founded in 2011 as an independent coaching and leadership-development practice and incorporated in 2025, Creative Rising has expanded over time to include strategic planning, organizational facilitation, learning design, governance, research and Strategic Inquiry.
The practice supports organizations working through change, complexity and questions that do not always arrive with a ready-made answer.
What Shapes the Practice
Organizational questions are rarely only about strategy, structure or individual behaviour. They are also shaped by relationships, histories, responsibilities, resources, governance and the wider environments in which organizations operate.
Creative Rising draws on multiple forms of inquiry and practice rather than applying a predetermined method. The approach is practical, participatory and attentive to context.
The aim is to understand a situation well enough to make useful choices—and to support the people and organizations responsible for carrying those choices into practice.
Founder & Principal
Leanna Barwick
Leanna Barwick is the Founder & Principal of Creative Rising.
Her work spans strategic planning, facilitation, organizational learning, coaching, governance, participatory research and Strategic Inquiry across cultural, nonprofit, higher-education and institutional settings.
As Principal, Leanna is responsible for the design and integration of Creative Rising engagements. Depending on the work, this may include project architecture, inquiry and synthesis, key facilitation, client relationships and quality oversight.
Her professional background brings together coaching and leadership development, organizational facilitation, governance, accessibility research, curriculum design and creative practice.
This interdisciplinary foundation supports work that connects people and structures, qualitative inquiry and organizational decision-making, and creative possibility with practical implementation.
Leanna holds the Professional Certified Coach credential from the International Coaching Federation, with advanced training in relational and systems-oriented coaching, leadership development, conflict and process work, and assessment.
These areas of practice inform the work without functioning as a fixed formula. Methods are selected according to the purpose, people and context of each engagement.
Connect with Leanna on LinkedIn
Particular Depth in Arts, Culture & Creative Practice
Creative Rising works across a range of organizational settings, with particular depth in arts, culture and creative practice.
Arts and cultural organizations often hold several responsibilities at once: creative purpose, organizational sustainability, governance, funding relationships, public purpose, community relationships, accessibility and the working realities of artists, staff and leadership.
Creative Rising brings organizational practice together with experience in arts, design, digital culture, higher education, research-creation and governance in creative and cultural settings.
This supports an understanding of cultural organizations from several perspectives: as workplaces and institutions, as sites of creative practice and as participants in wider cultural and public ecosystems.
This cultural-sector depth is a specialization within a broader organizational practice, not a boundary around the kinds of organizations Creative Rising can support.
Principal-Led, Associate-Supported
Creative Rising is principal-led, with clear accountability for project direction, client relationships and quality.
Where an engagement benefits from additional expertise or delivery capacity, Creative Rising may bring in carefully selected associates and specialist collaborators.
Complementary expertise may include facilitation, mediation, research, governance, accessibility, evaluation or other capabilities relevant to the work.
Associates are selected for their expertise, fit with the engagement and ability to work within clear roles, responsibilities and professional standards.
This model allows Creative Rising to assemble appropriate capability without assuming every organizational question can—or should—be addressed by a single practitioner or discipline.
Roles and responsibilities are established as part of project design.
Start with a Conversation
An engagement may begin with a clearly defined project or with a situation that still needs to be understood.
An initial conversation can clarify the context, what is at stake and what kind of work may be useful.