The world needs creative problem solvers who can harness their disciplinary knowledge to create positive change and advance innovative solutions and policies. The Curb Creative Campus Initiative responds to this call by creating sustainable programs to ignite, illuminate, and nurture creativity and innovation on Vanderbilt’s campus.

We seek to place creativity at the center of campus life through programs that

• support course and curricular innovations, especially those that integrate media, design, creative problem solving, and expression with rigorous disciplinary training;
• create a community of catalysts–faculty, staff, students, and Nashville community members who thrive on making the non-routine happen in their classrooms, research, and work;
• transform campus spaces through serendipitous, out-of-the-ordinary encounters and experiences that break mundane conventions of everyday routines and induce heightened thoughtful engagement and curiousity;
• provoke conversations that bring together unexpected parties and inspire novel approaches to engaging ideas, debates, and problems;
• illuminate extraordinary and everyday creative lives, including the common creative process that threads through artistic, scientific, entrepreneurial, and design work; and
• promote creative problem solving and build capacity of faculty, staff, and students to imagine ideas and lead others in making innovations a reality.

The Curb Center at Vanderbilt had been at the forefront of a national movement focused on creativity as a means to advance educational reform and enlien campus life. The unique aspects of the Curb Creative Campus Initiative–endowed Curb Scholars program, an emphasis on sustainable programs, the development of a corps of catalysts, and social scientific research–distinguish Vanderbilt’s Curb Creative Campus Initiative from all other campus-based programs.