AN AWARD-WINNING PRACTICE
WITH CREATIVITY AT OUR CORE

WHAT WE DO

Patricia Huntsman Culture + Communication (PHCC) works with all levels of government, First Nations, and arts organizations – drawing out insights, generating practical ideas, and developing actionable solutions that position culture at the heart of community well-being.

We are well-known for our inclusive and creative engagement processes that gather meaningful input for the development of long-term policies, plans, and strategies that are rooted in local context and organizational culture.

Too often, our clients come to us after other planning approaches have fallen short of realizing the community’s full creative potential. Our consultancy brings over 15 years of sector-specific experience, ensuring that every aspect of your plan is rooted in real cultural insight and industry best practices. We specialize in arts and cultural planning that is deeply informed, passionately executed, and rooted in the unique identity of each community we serve.

- Grassroots Engagement: We prioritize local voices and values – investing in community involvement throughout the process.
- Creativity as a Core: From inception to completion, creativity is central to our process.
- Intersectional Lens: We address intersecting systems of exclusion in arts and culture. To quote Audre Lorde, “We do not live single-issue lives.”
- Evidence-Based Decisions: We rely on thorough research, respecting the diversity of each community’s culture.
- Consensus-Driven: All voices are valued, with a focus on building trust and achieving mutual agreement.
- Reciprocity with the Land: We emphasize relationships with the land, fostering connections that honour local resources. All the work we do supports decolonization, EDIA (equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility), and economic and environmental sustainability.

- People-Centered and Inclusive Design: Our planning process is centered around the community, prioritizing the needs, preferences, and experiences of those who will be impacted by the work.
- Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (EDIA) Lens: We create safer spaces for dialogue—both internally and externally—moving beyond tokenistic engagement, ensuring that equity-deserving communities are authentically included and empowered to participate.
- Co-Designing with Flexibility. We actively collaborate with clients and communities to co-create change pathways and work plans based on unique perspectives.
- Accountability and Transparency: We consolidate our specialized knowledge to support your initiatives, ensuring a client-centered approach to designing plans, policies, and strategies.
- Regional and National Perspectives in a Local Context: Our approach is informed by regional and national cultural trends, grounded in a client’s unique context.
- Creative-Based Engagement: We incorporate a creative lens at every opportunity to foster rich and engaging dialogue, and to enhance the final product’s depth and resonance.

Advocating for arts and cultural development includes a commitment to protecting the rights of artists and creative workers. As cultural planners, part of our work involves staying up to date on technological developments that shape our sector. While Artificial Intelligence can support some aspects of the work we do (such as summarizing data), we know utilizing AI can harm the integrity of our work.
Collaborating with communities is nuanced, intuitive, and requires a deep understanding of the sector and its many peculiarities – this is critical to cultural policy development. It is important that we remain open-minded to change and continue to think critically about these tools including their environmental impacts, issues surrounding confidentiality, privacy, and safety, and lack of fact-checking data with trusted sources.
PHCC will NOT use generative AI for crafting any of the following:
- Client communications
- Written proposals, reports, frameworks, or plans
- Analyzing and coding data such as theming engagement inputs
- Design or copy for engagement materials (e.g. handouts, slides, posters)
- Strategy development
PHCC may use generative AI to support the following:
- Transcribing written information from engagement activities (such as post-it notes)
- Summarizing meeting notes (with consent of meeting attendees)
- Improving accessibility
- Generating transcripts from engagement activities (when audio elements are included)
- Translating communications (as a preliminary step, similar to using Google translate)
- Expanding client-provided images (e.g. using Adobe’s Generative Expand tool)
We must be accountable to each other for the future of the arts in Canada and it is our collective responsibility to recognize creativity as being integral to humanity.
Our team will continue to monitor the implementation of Canada’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy: AI for All and adapt our statement where it is ethical to do so. Throughout our project process, we ask that our clients do not use AI technologies to generate feedback on deliverables when possible.

“AI assists our communication; it does not replace our thinking, our testimony, or our community voice.” – Stimpunks

ABOUT PATRICIA HUNTSMAN

Patricia Huntsman (she/her) is a two-time nationally
award-winning arts and cultural strategist, policy writer and planner. She worked nationally and internationally in senior cultural sector roles, and is a sought-after voice on arts and culture-led community and economic development in Canada.

After working with over 52 communities around the province, she holds a deep understanding of BC’s cultural sector context. She pairs this with a special focus on organizational assessment, planning and capacity-building for arts organizations stemming from her Masters in Business Administration. She is recognized for her intuitive, engaging, dedicated people-centered approach, using an intersectionalist lens, and has rooted her practice in UNDRIP since 2009.