BLUE DRUM Arts Specialist Support Agency
“Community Culture� A five year strategy to revalue, renew, and reinvent community arts
An Initiative of Blue Drum with the Department for Arts, Heritage, and the Gaeltacht, the Department for Children and Youth Affairs, and the Child and Family Agency
AIM The “Community Culture” strategy aims to revalue, renew and reinvent community arts.
OBJECTIVES The “Community Culture” strategy will pursue six inter-connected objectives to: 1. Develop an organisational platform for community arts and social inclusion. This platform will initially be drawn from within those communities and organisations engaged in the “Community Culture” strategy. It will evolve over the life of the strategy to be more encompassing of the diversity of interests and stakeholders in this field. It will focus specifically on community arts in contexts of social exclusion. 2. Support and develop new models of community arts. These model projects will serve to devise more relevant and sustainable approaches to cultural inclusion, to make stronger links between cultural inclusion and social inclusion, and to further evolve the practice of community arts in a changing context. Limerick, Cork and Dublin will be the test sites. 3. Build capacities for community arts within communities. This will involve training, networking opportunities and national events to share the experiences in, and the learning from, community arts in Ireland and abroad. 4. Deveop the human and organisational infrastructures for community arts and social inclusion at local level. This will involve developing the ecology at a local or community level of the child/youth /family/community development sectors, local authority sector, cultural sector, and artists and activists to enable and encourage them to work together to promote community arts in contexts of social exclusion. Limerick, Cork and Dublin will be the test sites. 5. Achieve a new visibility for and perspective on community arts. This will involve developing processes and materials to communicate the potential of community arts and the substance of the “Community Culture” strategy, actions and findings. Key audiences will be the general public, political decision makers, leaders and administrators in the field of arts and culture, communities that experience disadvantage, and those engaged in community arts. 6. Stimulate a mainsreaming of community arts. This will involve an engagement with the existing institutional infrastructure for arts and culture and, in particular with those parts playing roles, and with the potential to play roles, supporting community arts. This engagement will support the further evolution of the focus on community arts within this institutional infrastructure.
2