Jude Kelly
The Convener
The room, the network and the deal, brings the right people together.
Jude Kelly is quintessentially The Convener. Her leadership philosophy rests on creating shared spaces, festivals, dialogues and cross-community gatherings where people self-determine their own transformation, and she explicitly rejects top-down prescription. WOW and Being a Man are designed as open architectures of encounter rather than campaigns, and her instinct is always to widen the circle, drawing in those who would never call themselves feminists, instead of consolidating a movement around the already persuaded.
“In a festival, nobody's frightened of the word festival in the way they're frightened of the word art. They expect to bump into stuff and they expect to have some surprise. And that gives the human going to the festival a sense of their own adventure.”
“Don't turn the world into a group of people standing on a pedestal saying we know what's right. That is not caring and it's not loving and it's not likely to have a good outcome.”
“I've seen the most amazing transformations happen to people because they heard a story, they got involved in discussion, they met somebody in the queue. And there you can see the whole mindset shifts.”
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy: “Jude Kelly: what feminism looks like in the age of 'strong men' politics”
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