Make It Happen
Skills Development Program
Facilitated by Carl Sciberras
Program dates for 2025 to be announced
About the program
Make It Happen is a professional and skills development program for creative practitioners and producers to refine their skills in making project or program ideas happen. Delivered through a project-based learning methodology, participants in the program are encouraged (though not required) to come with an idea at the ready and can utilise the skills developed throughout the program to consolidate a working project plan around their project idea.
The areas the program covers include:
- Entrepreneurship and innovation: design thinking and lean methodologies
- Contextual analysis: positioning your idea as part of a series of systems
- Stakeholder management: how to conduct stakeholder analysis to develop and manage relationships
- Understanding your ‘customer’: motivation and market research
- Strategic marketing: dynamic and targeted approaches to marketing
- Project planning: using the iron triangle principle to scaffold project plans
- Project management: budgeting, risk assessment and timelines
- Making a case: fundraising and partnership development
- The impact of learning: evaluation as an embedded process
The program will be delivered in-person at LOT7, and will also be made available to participate online for those in the region who cannot travel to in-person sessions.
Participants will need to bring a laptop to access resources and templates used throughout the program, and will be provided with access to a secure folder with these resources prior to each session.
About your facilitator
Carl Sciberras is a producer, choreographer, performer, teacher and arts advocate from Western Sydney. Carl has co-founded two successful creative enterprises: Dance Makers Collective, a not-for-profit company that produces performance works, skills development and education programs with a focus on community-led practice – and Flatline, a visual art and dance collaboration that creates performance, installation and art works that have been presented internationally.
Having worked in management and marketing positions for a range of performing arts organisations, and having produced the work of independent artists, Carl is adept at helping people navigate a range of creative business challenges. He has extensive experience in writing and assessing grant applications (as a peer at the Australia Council and an assessor for Create NSW and others), as well as in complex project management with a wide range of stakeholders. Carl effortlessly blends the ‘business’ side of company management, administration, planning and development and the ‘creative’ side as a maker and performer.
Carl is currently employed by Creative Plus Business as a Business Advisor, was recently on the Artform Advisory Board for Dance & Physical Theatre at Create NSW and has held various positions on boards and committees for local, state and federal government arts bodies and independent arts companies. In 2017, Carl was a participant in the Australia Council’s Future Leaders Program and in 2016 was awarded the City of Parramatta’s Creative Fellowship.