Education & Youth Blog 

More and more businesses are recognizing that creativity is an important competitive advantage. In a 2010 IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs creativity was named as “the most important leadership quality over the next five years.” However, in another recent study of The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, Professor Kyung Hee Kim of the College of William & Mary found that “creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward.” She analyzed 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. The population most effected by the decrease is younger children, kindergarten to sixth grade; which Kim says is the “most serious” decline.

I recently came across an African proverb: “If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go together.” For the last six months, FSG has been working with stakeholders from around New York State and around the juvenile justice system in a collective impact effort aimed at developing a shared vision, goals, and strategies for reform. Given that we’ve been so immersed in this effort, upon reading this proverb, my thoughts immediately went to (what else?!) juvenile justice reform.