The Shumka Centre for Creative Entrepreneurship at Emily Carr University has launched a new website and announced a host of new resources, including publications and an upcoming monthly series of online roundtable conversations curated by Ceci Moss.

A suite of sleek how-to guides, designed with help from student designer Nicole Yamamoto, are among the first publications to be released, with thirteen different booklets covering diverse topics such as How to Build Community, How to Price Your Work, and How to Create a Simple Project Budget.

Based on last year’s Skill Up Series -- co-hosted with Career Development and Work Integrated Learning at ECU -- and other recent Shumka Centre programs, the guides draw on the expertise of leading professionals including gallerist and curator Wil Aballe; artist and ECU Research Technician Sean Arden; artist and ECU Studio Technician Yang Hong; Executive Director of the BC Co-operative Association Andrea Harris; and Executive Director of the League of Innovators Joanna Buckowzska McCumber.


“The guides provide practical skills in areas that fall outside of regular curriculum learning, and are geared toward creative practitioners in any discipline,” says Kate Armstrong, Director of the Shumka Centre.

Developed in partnership with Career Development and Work Integrated Learning at ECU, the first thirteen how-to guides were published Sept. 11, with more to follow in the coming months.

Shumka’s new website, branded by Vancouver’s Post Projects, is home to all of Shumka Centre’s many programs, which serve ECU students, alumni, community partners and the general public. Inaugurated in the fall of 2018 through a grant with Vancouver Foundation, the centre is the outcome of extensive consultation processes, case studies and other precedent research, and an institutional audit of existing initiatives, challenges, and opportunities.

Cemre Demiralp, coordinator at Living Labs, a parent organization for the centre, says the website, as well as the centre’s evolving mandate more broadly, are built around the needs of the people they serve.


“We have taken the feedback from our community to pilot programs and partnerships that serve our community in the past year,” Cemre says. “The website is an effort to build capacity for the centre, and deepen the centre’s internal and external identity and relationships.”


The Shumka Centre’s new initiatives, as with all its programming, are a form of “tactical support specifically designed for the needs of artists and designers.” This skill-focused approach to practical learning “is the first step in achieving a systemic change to empower creative people,” the centre writes.

“The Shumka Centre fosters the movement of artists and designers into systems and situations where their work and ideas can have the most impact. It is a place where artists and designers can find the community, knowledge, and resources they need to launch, fund, and organize projects across the spectrum of contemporary art and design activities – products, projects, curatorial initiatives, platforms, companies, organizations, and more.”

Meanwhile, the monthly conversation series brings together artists, curators, activists, designers, architects, and arts organizers from around the globe to “discuss their work in creating groundbreaking new models for the arts sector.”

Visit the new website and download the how-to guides today, and to find out more about upcoming speakers series as they’re announced.