Meet Geraldine Ysselstein

We recently connected with Geraldine Ysselstein and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Geraldine , really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

I think finding my purpose has been guided by a number of questions including: Who am I? What am I passionate about? What are my life experiences? What challenges me? What is unique about me? What are my gifts? How have I been encouraged? What is needed of me in this time? What is my vision for the future?

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I am Geraldine Ysselstein (she/her) and I am an artist, facilitator, and consultant located in Alberta, Canada. I was born in the Netherlands, which is in the lowlands of Europe. In the early years of my life, I lived in Bangladesh and then I grew up near the Speed River in Guelph, Ontario. Guelph is situated on the ancestral homelands of the Anishinaabek Peoples, specifically the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

Currently, I live in Mohkinstsis which is the Blackfoot name for Calgary and it is where the Bow River meets the Elbow River. I am a Treaty person leaning into the responsibilities and relationships of living in the Treaty 7 Territory, along with my husband and our two children. The Treaty 7 Territory is the land of the Niitsitapi from the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Îyârhe Nakoda, the Tsuut’ina First Nation, and is home to the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta Districts 5 and 6. This land has also become home to all those who identify as immigrants, newcomers, settlers, and guests.

My life has been immersed in arts, culture, and creativity. Growing up, my family hosted classical, folk, and jazz concerts and an art gallery in our one-room schoolhouse in Ontario. Since that time, I have worked as an arts manager in both Ontario and Alberta at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, Wilder & Davis Luthiers, Big Boreal Adventure, Willow Springs Creative Centre, Calgary Civic Symphony, and the Rozsa Foundation.

In the last 18 months, I have embarked on the journey of becoming a creative entrepreneur where I have combined an artistic, facilitative, and consultative practice in my company called Riverstone. My purpose in these three intersecting practices is to inspire and weave the transformative power of arts, culture, story, and creativity into systems change by cultivating a curious and creative space of care. Working towards systems change, social justice, and social change has always been part of my personal and professional life. I am constantly envisioning a more just society and I take steps to make that a reality through listening, researching, questioning, reading, inviting, speaking, writing, showing up, building reciprocal relationships, cheering, imagining, creating, translating, and being.

In the next couple of months, I am looking forward to offering some public and private facilitations around the theme of cultivating collective care, further developing my artistic practice by creating a water soundscape surrounding the question “Where is Nature?”, and doing some consultation around social change in and through the arts.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

As a child, I spent a lot of time reading. Reading has helped me to develop skills and knowledge in empathy, deep listening, and the ability to see from multiple perspectives. These skills have helped me to hold space for the complexities and contradictions for the world we live in and the lives we live.

For those who want to develop these skills, I highly recommend witnessing and/or engaging with any art form. Art gives us an opportunity to pause, reflect, grieve, listen, empathize, process, struggle, (un)learn, forgive, change, love, heal, and imagine. We all need more of this.

Looking back over the past 12 months or so, what do you think has been your biggest area of improvement or growth?

One of the biggest areas of growth that I have had over the last 12 months is trusting myself as a creative entrepreneur. Trusting that I am exactly where I need to be, that I am doing exactly what I need to be doing, and that people will find me.

We have been conditioned to not trust ourselves, to not trust our intuition, to not trust what our bodies are telling us, and to not trust each other. For the first 6 months of this year in 2024, I had almost no paid work. I had to shift my thinking from concern (freaking out!) to giving myself permission to use the time I had to work on my new artistic practice of weaving. I had to trust that the paid work would come when I was ready for it.

Another aspect of this is trusting that I have enough and that I am enough. So often we resort to feelings of fear, control, hustle, imposter syndrome, and burn-out; but these are unsustainable practices. Trust is an ongoing practice.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Samuel Obadero at Motif Photography

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