Help us Identify Community Culture Demonstration Projects
Modelling culture as a driver for sustainable communities
Rationale: Agenda 21 for Culture contends that culture can deliver vitality, identity and innovation for communities. Why? Because culture helps to connect the three established pillars of sustainable development. These are economic development, social inclusion and environmental sustainability. Development can only be sustainable if culture is given a central role.1 Imagine large-scale cultural opportunities focused on ‘community’ and ‘place’ not narrowly defined in terms of outreach and audience development? It was possible before and it can happen again. The integration of culture, and art as an expression of culture, into a sustainable development agenda requires collaborative work with communities as co-creators of their activities in the present and their hopes for the future. Proposal: 1) Adopt the Charter for Cultural Rights, developed following workshops in Galway, Cork, Wexford, Ballyhaunis, Sligo and Dublin and deploy the Charter, as a concrete framework to pilot, test and assess the impact of community culture projects that prioritise community engagement. 2) Demonstrate that the Charter for Cultural Rights can be applied to give expression to, and to measure the impact and value of the local aims e.g. European Capital of Culture, community-led participation in Agenda 21 Pilot Cities Initiative; and cultural rights in the new arts and cultural plans. 3) Develop a toolkit that communities and community development organisations can use to 'equality-proof' top-down initiatives, on the basis of the nine grounds of the equal status legislation and socio-economic accessibility, and compatibility with the public sector and human rights duty introduced by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Act 2014.
Vision:
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Culture 21, Agenda 21 for Culture
Local community development is about values, people and place. Civil society, including activists and artists, has a central role in developing sustainable urban and rural space. The vision for this initiative is to cultivate processes that embrace culture as a driver of integrated, sustainable and transformative practices within communities, and to ensure that opportunities created are accessible to all. Goals: To demonstrate the potential of the Charter for Cultural Rights as a guide for community culture practice that innovates, empowers and engages within local communities. Actions: - Engage with 3 practice sites in to develop capacity and capability initiatives to engage in participatory research and innovation that demonstrates community culture in action. -Deliver a model to embed the public sector duty to have regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, promote equality and protect human rights in local arts and culture institutions in order to advance a focus on equality, cultural rights and valuesbased planning and programming. - Develop a community culture practice series of publications to capture the histories and imaginaries that have informed the development of diverse local communities. - Stimulate new solutions to challenges of community-led participation models by supporting a strong voice for civil society in the Culture 21 - Pilot Cities Initiative. Impact : -Transformative potential of community-led cultural development and its sustainability demonstrated. -‘Know‒how’ developed which can equip projects with reflective practices that use a rights perspective. -‘Show‒how’ applied with critical processes to document the learning and lessons.
Charter for Cultural Rights Community can be place-based, defined by the geographical space people live in; and it can be identitybased, spread across different geographical areas, encompassing groups of people such as Travellers, migrants, people with disabilities, women, older people, young people, and LGBT people. In this regard there are individual and group experiences of exclusion that criss-cross domains and intensify the loss of rights. Community can also be interest based where people assemble around an idea or theme of concern e.g. child poverty, exclusion, etc.
Cultural heritage, for UNESCO, involves the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills, as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith, that communities, groups and in some cases individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage. It is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their environment, their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity.
Cultural expressions are those expressions that result from the creativity of individuals, groups and societies and that have cultural content. Cultural content refers to the symbolic meaning, artistic dimension, and cultural values that originate from or express cultural identities.
We have power to put Community Culture into action for the cultural rights of people and place. 1.
1. Community is Culture. Culture scrolls us backwards to connect to the inhabitants of Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth and fast forwards us to the future creativity of the new Irish. Although a core part of society, culture is like an iceberg moving in ways that are unseen and unheard in and through community. 2. Culture needs Community. Community is a place of meaning-making, out of which objects, artefacts and cultural spaces as broad and diverse as the hearth, the knitted sweater and the YouTube video emerge.
Charter for Cultural Rights 3. Community + Culture = Politics. Culture gives expression to the invisible dimensions; the unheard voice; and the silent contradictions. It prevents the drift to passivity and consumerism and all the democratic deficits this engenders. 4. Community + Culture = Transformation. Many community activists and artists are at the forefront of creative work nested in initiatives seeking equality and human rights. This offers the power to feel and transform one’s self in relation to others, to renew and reframe institutions, and to shape and reshape the value base of our society. Transformation requires agency and an institutional ecology based on the common-good. 5. Community + Culture = Civil Society. A shift beyond the dominant models of arts provision is urgent. This shift must involve civil society, a civil society resourced and ready to take up new formations and innovations. 6. Community + Culture = Equality. Communities need to enjoy an equality of status and recognition of their culture. They are producers and consumers of culture, and need access to publicly subsidised funding for their cultural expression. Their cultural rights must be recognised, fulfilled and given parity of esteem. 7. Community + Culture = Place. Communities are connected by place and identity and identification with place. Environment, landscape, nature, and materials underpin community and culture, and change. This connectedness is based on a renewed sense of mutuality and environmental stewardship. By signing up to the Charter we share a joint commitment to make it real.