Who are we?

Carla Stephenson Founder and Lead

Carla’s work sits at the intersection of arts, systems change, rural innovation and amplification. She is the founder of the Rural Arts Inclusion Lab and the Executive Director of Renascence, a non-profit society in Ymir BC. She and her husband of 27 years Shawn founded the Tiny Lights Festival. Carla is a member of the Arts BC Insight team and an alumna of the Positive Deviants Fellowship, and is currently the director of the Pathways program.

She has presented at the Canadian Arts Summit and the Canadian Rural Revitalization Foundation Conference sharing the innovations her organizations have made in equity and sustainability. 

Her facilitation work is grounded in creating conditions where emergence can happen through listening and collective story harvesting. She believes art plays a vital role in disrupting and getting to the truth of issues in subversive and overt ways. Carla brings to her work the lived experience of being a mixed-race woman of colour and mother who lives on the unceded and stolen land of the Sinixt (sńʕaýckstx ).

RAIL is a collective that is always evolving. In the past 4 years, we have facilitated over 350 artists, administrators and funders in 16 cohorts. Through this process, the most important thing we learned is that relationships are the fabric and web that hold our sector together.

We have several working cohorts visioning and shaping the direction of this work. We continue our goal of amplifying rural voices through our work.