Podcast Episode 145

How can a passion for helping people flourish lead to social innovation? We speak with K Scarry about social innovation and the ways she is supporting local artists, helping create spaces where everyone can thrive, and more.

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How can a passion for helping people flourish lead to social innovation? In this episode we speak with K Scarry about social innovation and the ways she is supporting local artists, helping create spaces where everyone can thrive, and more.

Doug Powe: Welcome to Leading Ideas Talks, a podcast featuring thought leaders and innovative practitioners. I am Douglas Powe, the director of the Lewis Center, and your host for this talk. Joining me is K Scarry, owner of Creative Impact Studio. Our focus is social innovation. I’m really excited to have K joining us today. K is one of the most creative people I’ve ever met in my life, and I’m going to begin by just having her share a little bit about herself and how she got into the space of social innovation.

K Scarry: Yeah, thanks so much, Dr. Powe. It’s good to be here. I’m K Scarry. I have always really been curious about communities and how they form and how we build relationships of mutuality. When I think about how this started for me, a couple of stories come to mind:

One is that when I was younger, I had a couple of really dear family members, one of whom was experiencing homelessness, and one of whom was incarcerated. I remember being a kid and being in spaces where I heard how other adults, or other families, or people, or culture were talking about the unhoused population, or about incarcerated individuals, and I remember even from a young age being like, “there’s more to the story here.” So, it really drove a curiosity in me and an inability, even from a young age, to dehumanize people in scenarios that I haven’t had to experience before. I think that started a spark of curiosity in me alongside some real empathy and longing for, “wait a second, what happens when the people in our communities actually don’t have the support they need in order to be well?”

When I was in middle school was when hurricane Katrina hit. I remember being really devastated about watching that on the news, and my dad kind of walked me through a series of, “you can’t seem to let this one go so maybe we should come up with something you can do about it.” He helped me think about some things I could do. He was like, you can make a phone call to a grocery store, organize a bake sale, and send the money. Even from a young age, I feel like I was really empowered about looking at what you have in front of you, considering where you are, what you have, what you can do, do something, and trust that contributes to something bigger than you could do on your own. So, that really sparked something in me that I feel like has been a thread my whole life of exploring what it is to build communities where everyone can flourish, where everyone has the support and tools they need, and how do we creatively invite people into imagining what might be possible for them?

Doug Powe: Thank you for that and I would say 100% you have. What I find is fascinating is the way that you sort of marry—you have a master divinity—your love of theology with this love of creativity. I want to begin really practically diving into this conversation. Lately, you’ve come up with this really interesting and creative idea of vending machine art as a way of sharing the work of the community. I want you to talk about that, but then talk about how this actually could be helpful for a congregation in thinking about doing something creative like this.

K Scarry: Yeah, absolutely. So, it’s not totally my original idea, I will say. My husband and I were on a trip to Miami a year and a half ago and had a long layover in Chicago, and we stumbled upon what’s called a creative vending machine. It had nontraditional items in it, like nostalgia items or vintage items, and some local art. We were really taken by this, and at this point I’d already built a practice of keeping a note on my phone of anything that inspires me, and noticing where there are red threads, resonance, and through lines. There is a D.C. company that vends locally made snacks, which is also a cool iteration of vending with the local community in mind. But we really wanted to do it as a way of supporting local artists. Also, I like to buy local art, so it helps satisfy that in me. But we started, a year ago, exploring what it would look like to buy art from all kinds of local folks making different things—art and other handmade things. Like we have somebody who has a lathe and makes wood turned items and makes bottle openers we have in the machine. So, it’s not just like fine art, if you will. The first one we had is set up in a brewery in Sterling, Virginia, where we vend all locally made goods, for the most part. There’s a couple of items that are like convenience items and that’s kind of how we make business work is by having 75% of it be locally made and then about 25% of it be not locally made but higher profit margin so that we can pay artists well while also making the business work without requiring the growth of the business to be on the shoulders of artists.

I love so many things about it. On the one hand, it’s become a really cool hack of now we know 40 different…well, we’re working with 43 different local artists in this one machine right now but are in the process of expanding pretty significantly this year is our hope. I love that it’s meant we’ve gotten to know different venues. I like that it’s meant other types of collaboration. So, we have like a soap maker in the machine who can make soap out of beers. Since we’re in a brewery, he and the brewery have already connected to make soaps out of their beers. That’s kind of fun, that it’s generative in that way.

I love thinking about how we get people into a backdoor conversation about— or a backdoor into the most important conversations of our time. So, by that I mean, people have lots of questions about our vending machine. What I get to tell them is about the artist who’s a single mom who can never go to an artist market on a Saturday, or the three men in our town who are nonverbal and who have autism, who make a suite of really excellent like skincare body products that we have in the vending machine, but obviously they can’t ever sell at a market. Now suddenly we’re having a conversation about access and equity with people who might never show up to that seminar, which I think is interesting to the point of what churches can do?

Also, in a moment when I feel like the dominant conversations heard about churches are [focused on]long term survival, capaci