About — The Branch Out Project

Janice Merendino, the Founder and Director of The Branch Out Project, is a professional artist, former college professor, and one of five founders of The Clay Studio, an internationally recognized center for the development of ceramics based in Philadelphia. The website for her art work is: janicemerendino.com.
Janice has over thirty years experience designing and teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in the fine arts and visual literacy at Rosemont College. She has also designed and taught workshops for Accessible Programs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 1998. As part of Accessible Workshops Program at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Janice is currently working with Veterans through V.E.T. Art, Veterans Empowered through ART and PADRECC, Philadelphia Parkinson’s Disease Research, Education and Clinical Centers.
As director of The Branch Out Project, Janice conducts workshops for major corporations and government agencies (including the US Navy, GlaxoSmithKline, Wyeth Ayerst, and TIAA-CREF), for community non-profit groups, and in schools for students and teachers. She co-authored an article for Museums and Social Issues entitled Accessible Wellness Programs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and two articles on how drawing can enhance creativity and the practice of law for Altman Weil, Inc. Janice was awarded the Moore College of Art and Design Distinguished Alumni Award for 2018.

Don Wilson (Full Day Co-facilitator) has over thirty years of experience as a management consultant in the fields of idealized design, strategic planning, information systems, and business process redesign.
In addition, Don has extensive experience in the design and implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning and Performance Management (ERP/EPM) Systems, Business Intelligence Reporting systems, and Financial Reporting.
Don studied under management thinker Russell Ackoff at Wharton and was a partner at INTERACT, a consulting firm that Ackoff co-founded with Don and other Wharton colleagues. He has consulted for organizations such as the School District of Philadelphia and the Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces and for numerous companies, including Accenture, American Management Systems, Anheuser-Busch, Charles Schwab & Company, Chrysler, DuPont, Imperial Oil, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Procter & Gamble, Reality Technologies, and Superfresh Food Markets Inc.

HISTORY
In 1996, one of Janice Merendino’s adult students was struggling to fix something in his drawing, so they looked at the drawing together. Janice realized that, although the problem seemed to appear in one area of the drawing, the way to fix the problem was actually found in a different location. Janice conveyed this idea to her student to which he said, “Wow, that’s the same thing that keeps happening to me at work!” When asked what he meant by this, the student replied, “I keep missing where problems are because I focus on the wrong thing, get stuck on details, and never see the whole picture.”

After Janice’s session with her student, she started looking at all metaphors related to the drawing process. She specifically wanted to know: how the arts teach problem-solving skills that can impact people’s lives at home and at work, how people think about their work, and how our own ideas are shared with others. She realized that by rethinking how and to whom the arts are taught, we could expose more people to these creative problem-solving skills, and this is where the idea of Branch-Out Project was born.

Like Janice’s student, most adults have not developed their drawing skills and their understanding of the process is limited. These students believe, albeit incorrectly, that their lack of ability is due to an absence of talent. In reality, the inability to draw has more to do with self-imposed constraints, a lack of information, and the absence of an approachable introduction.

So, Janice developed a fun and non-intimidating instruction process that enables reluctant learners to make a significant leap in their skill level, in a very short period of time. The “Branch-Out Process,” reverses the usual sequence in which drawing is taught, giving beginners advanced ideas and techniques almost immediately. When learners are given “the good stuff” early on, they tend to be more motivated and invested in their work.