Inspired Collaboration: Maximizing Creativity Beyond Bars

Appreciation becomes more complete when it takes the form of a circle. During the #64millionartists #thejanuarychallenge day 21 of the 31-day creativity marathon, the prompt was "You Inspire Me". The ask was to recall someone who inspires you and reach out to them with appreciation. If I could only choose one (there are many) to acknowledge as inspirational, it would be someone who did not even know the impact she has had on me. I told her in the last 24 hours, and the appreciation came full circle.

Read on if these keywords keep you wondering... #unexpected #prisons #creativity #turnaround

Here is our story:

I posted a picture of the sunrise during the holidays with an invitation and pledge to appreciate each sunrise of 2025. For every Facebook friend that liked or commented, I wrote a message of good cheer for the New Year. One of them was a dear friend from Romania, Raluca. We had not talked in years but tracked changes in life via Facebook posts. We last saw each other in 2015, so we scheduled a video call to catch up yesterday.

During the course of the call, I told her how much she keeps on inspiring me, and she was so surprised. She never knew how much it meant to me that she turned something upsetting into something so positive for me. On April 5th, 2015, I was stranded in Bucharest due to missed flight connections. I could not get back to Zagreb and was so sad, as I had already been away during Easter break and wanted to get back to my family after a business trip. Raluca had visited me on the previous leg of the trip, and I called her in a panic to come and rescue me from the situation. She not only helped me rebook for a few days later; she arranged for me to achieve a goal of teaching creativity in a prison. While I know its certainly not on everyone's bucket list, after watching Stuart Brown: Play is more than just fun | TED Talk it was mine.

Raluca Stuparu, a program manager in the Administration of the National Penetiaries, Romania, quickly worked to get me a gig teaching at one of the top police academies in Europe one day April 6, 2015, 15:00 to 16:00, "Applied Creativity and Innovation for Law Enforcement and Correction Facilities," and a small group of staff (educators, trainers, social workers, psychologists, and reintegration experts at the Rahova prison just outside of Bucharest) at the maximum security prison the next April 7, 2015, 10:00 to 12:30, "Training the Trainer: Storyboarding and More Creativity Development Tools." This was seemingly effortless to her. These workshops continue to inspire the storytelling work I do as I share on key insights I learned from those unique settings and participants. My memory from some of those interactions is as fresh as yesterday. But the details are also captured, as I was working for Zagreb School of Economics and Management at the time, and my colleague Jagoda Poropat Darrer helped me document it all and share it on the school's website.

I am not sure I would even believe it if it did not happen to me. Turning things around and turning people into better versions of themselves is the nature of Raluca's profession. She is just a get-it-done kind of person. She offers warmth in an arena one might think is cold by default. Her work outside of life is an adventure too. We met through a program to empower women Invest for the Future in 2013, and it did fulfill its ambitious title. Many connections stay strong with women of inspiration, and I chose today to highlight Raluca—she inspires me.