The Beautiful Policy Podcast

Imagine if we completely rescripted practices of accounting in our organisations? Imagine if we let go of the narrow frame of filings and audits, and designed tools that fully capture the balance sheet of what is valuable and verifiable in Black and indigenous understandings?  In this episode Jessica Horn speaks with Amahra Spence, Birmingham based and Jamaica rooted visionary artist, spatial practitioner and director of Hood Futures Studio. Amahra shares the co-thinking she has done to reimagine accounting outside of the conventional practices of annual fiscal reporting. Working with Black and indigenous artists and knowledges, she traces ways we can reintegrate care, track our contributions to community, and reorient our frameworks for accountability so that they actually respond to our fuller organising visions and real life impacts.   Amahra Spence is a celebrated artist, curator, convener, strategist, researcher, systems designer and spatial practitioner. Inspired by social sculpture, her practice commits to infrastructure building, spatialising dream work, resource redistribution and platforming radical imagination as tactics for emancipation from systems of violence. She is the Founding Director of MAIA (2013-2025) and organiser of The Black Land & Spatial Justice Project (2020-2025). Committed to a deep practice of spatial justice for Black community, she pioneered YARD (2020), turning a residential townhouse into a neighbourhood site of imagination, artist residency space and community hub. She is currently working to create ABUELOS, an artist-led hotel and cultural space in Birmingham, UK grown from the spirit of Grandad's house. She also leads Land Black, a research and speculative design studio prototyping anti-carceral architectural and land-based strategies.    More on Amahra: Amahra’s website  Amahra’s Substack  Amahra Spence “Visionary Finance: Reimagining Tools & Capital in Service of Better Futures” May 2026   GRAFF: Accounting as Care Practice and Cultural Strategy.  February 2024. The Beautiful Policy Podcast team: Host: Jessica Horn Production: The LAM Sisterhood  Studio: Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications, Nairobi.  Team Lead: Anne Moraa Producer: Neddy Lusimbo Sound Engineer: Wambui Njuguna assisted by Marcus Garvey Kariuki Visual Artist: Chela Yego Audience Strategy: Melissa Mbugua Made with support from the Moleskine Foundation.  

Imagine if the governance of cities was designed by everyone who lives, works, loves, plays and travels through them daily? Imagine if we embraced the right that inhabitants of our cities have to shape them into fully liveable ecosystems?  In this episode Jessica Horn speaks with Gabriella Gómez Mont, the pioneering Chief Creative Officer for Mexico City. Gabriella speaks about the team that she led over a five year period, ‘hacking’ everything from road safety to the Uber/ taxi conflict, and even figuring out a way to crowdsource the development of Mexico City’s constitution. It's a masterclass in applying fierce imagination to concrete questions of daily life in a megacity, and proof of the value of creative, multi-disciplinary and ground-up thinking in urban governance. Gabriella Gómez-Mont is an award winning thinker on reimagining cities. A journalist, artist and filmmaker, Gabriella was appointed in 2013 as the first Chief Creative Officer for Mexico City, overseeing the Laboritorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory of the City), a creative think tank within the Mexico City government.She has been a Yale World Fellow, MIT Director’s Fellow, a GeorgeTown University Global Cities Initiative Visiting Fellow, a TED Senior Fellow, an Institute for the Future Fellow. She is the founder of Experimentalista - a nomadic creative agency focused on cities. More on Gabriella: Experimentalista website Gabriella Gómez-Mont: Right to the City.Ted X Danubia, 2023 Gabriella Gómez-Mont: "What we cannot imagine, we cannot put into practice.”  The Beautiful Policy Podcast team Production: The LAM Sisterhood  Studio: Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications, Nairobi.  Team Lead: Anne Moraa Producer: Neddy Lusimbo Sound Engineer: Wambui Njuguna assisted by Marcus Garvey Kariuki Visual Artist: Chela Yego Audience Strategy: Melissa Mbugua Made with support from the Moleskine Foundation.

Meet the host Jessica Horn as she introduces The Beautiful Policy Podcast. Jessica is an (East)African feminist strategist, futurist and award winning poet who has spent a quarter century in the work of justice and societal transformation in Africa and around the world. In this podcast she is in dialogue with some of the most generous and luminous policy trailblazers that she has encountered on that journey globally. Expect polymaths, mavericks and surprising back stories on major wins for people and planet. If you need affirmation that we can remake the world, then this podcast is for you!  The Beautiful Policy Podcast team: Production: The LAM Sisterhood  Studio: Aga Khan University’s Graduate School of Media and Communications, Nairobi.  Team Lead: Anne Moraa Producer: Neddy Lusimbo Sound Engineer: Wambui Njuguna assisted by Marcus Garvey Kariuki Visual Artist: Chela Yego Audience Strategy: Melissa Mbugua Made with support from the Moleskine Foundation.