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Community culture and rights workshop series Work continues with Rachel Mullen at the Equality and Rights Alliance. We were well received and supported by Stephen and Treacy in Ballyhaunis FRC and 11 activists and artists attended.

Other workshops planned are Sligo in association with Sligo Arts Office and The Model on April 22nd Cork in association with www.cesca.ie in the Traveller Visibility Group on April 24th Wexford in association with TUSLA in FDYS Enniscorthy on April 29th.

We have now completed our Blue Print 2015-2019. The Company AGM, Annual Accounts and Report were published in March. New developments include:  Voluntary Code of Governance process concluded and submitted for approval

We’ve had conversations in Limerick, Galway, Dublin and Belfast. Our intention is to explore how to advance community culture and whether a rights framework can help identify practical ways locally in which to be agents of change.

 New Board members are: Sheelagh Colclough from Belfast Fiona Woods from Clare Jim Aherne from Galway Ciaran Cuffe from Dublin.  Mark McCollum, Mary Doheny and Ken Keogh were reappointed.

Eleanor Phillips is now the Company Secretary. We are very thankful to one of our founding members, Mick Daly from Clare who has now retired. The Annual Report and Accounts can be viewed here: 2015 [+] Blue Print can be viewed here: Read [+]

Creative Parenting As a follow-up to our 3 year Happy Parent work we now seek to establish a practice site in which to understand resilience of parents with young children (0-7yrs) through art/culture practice.

Eurofound as well as UK based Young and Joseph Rowntree Foundations found that parenting support is a major gap 1

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across the EU and beyond ‘play’ we notice an absence of of discourse about art/culture work too. Can that change?

Panel In January and February we advertised on Activelink for people who were interested in becoming members of Blue Drum’s Panel. The Panel is a resource for us of people who we could call upon to deliver work outlined in our Blue Print 2015-2019. We will also use the Panel when we recommend people in response to queries from FRCs. We received 64 applications from across the country.

We seek to explore how best to call-out parents inherent creativity with interventions that are appropriately human, playful and linked to capacities for relationship, respect, appreciation and wonder. These interventions can be  bottom up initiatives by FRCs and others;  organised by parents who selfassemble, identify their shared experiences and needs;  devised in ways that are supportive

Community art and cultural rights Advocacy work continued with the Irish Government about social, economic and cultural rights With FLAC we have tried to define new thinking about community culture. The failure to grapple with community arts does not undermine what the Department of Arts, the Arts Council and local authorities are doing but challenges what they are not doing.

We recommend:

We’ve selected 4 people from our Panel list to discuss this field of interest. Any FRC should get in touch if interested in attending a day-long seminar in Galway called Opening the Door to Creative Teaching and Learning and organised by Baboró on May 28th Just emailing blue.drum@yahoo.com

1. The Department of the Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, the Arts Council, and other National Cultural Institutions would promote equality and social inclusion in cultural life through direct engagement with disadvantaged communities and through realising their potential as consumers and producers of arts and culture.

Artist: Steve Powers Love Letter to the City

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2. The Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht would adopt a cultural rights framework in the forthcoming national Cultural Policy and the Arts Council would do likewise in their forthcoming Strategic Plan through having regard to equality and human rights.

Community Culture We’ve also held conversations with Creative Communities in Limerick and some individuals in Galway with a view to finding new ways to reset community arts. We see Family Resource Centres as an important national catalyst in this conversation. Ed was also invited to a PICAS workshop organised by Community Arts Partnership in Belfast on March 6th and there is interest there too. All in all there is common ground for the emergence of an all-island platform to foster community culture and encourage co-creation and cooperative approaches to community resilience.

For more info see www.ourvoiceourrights We also have a dedicated ‘cultural rights’ evidence room of documents, like the following, that we find helpful: Read [+] Community Culture Strategy and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht In February we met with Minister Humphrey‘s and her officials.We stressed the pressing need to establish greater equality and social inclusion in the arts and culture field and to deepen the fulfilment of cultural rights. The Community Culture Strategy represents a clear sighted and action based initiative which would help bring a coherence to the capacity of local, regional and national practice to address the central issue of arts access and participation on a carefully planned, long term and incremental basis.

Conference Report (Feb 2015) In February Eleanor Phillips attended a conference ‘Public Assets: small-scale arts organisations and the production of value’ hosted by Common Practice in the Platform Theatre, London, in February.

Common Practice is an advocacy group working for the recognition and fostering of the small-scale contemporary visual arts sector in London. They have produced two interesting papers: ‘Size Matters’ by Sarah Thelwall, which argued for a more sophisticated understanding of the concept of value, and ‘Value, Measure, Sustainability’ by Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt which argued for different ways of measuring the artistic contributions of small organisations.

The conference’s aim was to “address the ways in which it is possible to assert a non-financialised ethos within the

PICAS Conference, Belfast 2015 3

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current funding landscape of the arts".

The morning presentations, in particular

small scale arts organisations” which was chaired by Ian Hunter of Littoral, http://www.littoral.org.uk/. The group felt that rural or small town organisations were more resourceful and more inclusive as a natural outcome of the involvement of the immediate community. It was also noted that it is much easier to meet with local policy makers. It was felt that the dangers came from the larger or national funders who seemed to see rural as a place to simply “decant” the urban art experience.

The afternoon included three further presentations offering examples of organisational practice from outside the UK. Maria Lind presented the work of Tensta Konsthall, Sweden, focussing on its networks and collaborations, suggesting that it was easier to make international collaborations due to the competition between organisations within national borders. Jesús Carrillo spoke of his work at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofìa and the difficulty of maintaining an approach akin to activism within the changing political environment in Spain. Lise Soskolne from W.A.G.E. in the USA meanwhile presented detailed argument for the need to pay artists working with non-profit organisations. Overall main issues were not new ones:

Common Practice London (Feb 2015)

Kodwo Eshun, looked at the values created by small organisations. He suggested that concepts become subcultures through enduring friendships which go on to create their own language and lived attitude. These communities of concepts need spaces rather than clubs and galleries in order to realise their ideas. He looked at the organisations which provide spaces for caring within their arts provision such as crèches, and meeting rooms thereby suggesting that “care” rather than “value” should be the overarching term used by small arts organisations. An audience member pointed out that those doing the ‘caring’ are predominantly female both in small arts organisations and in society in general which also points to their lack of value within society or markets.

 instrumentalisation of the arts and the benediction given to “creative industries”,  top down ideas of social change.

Part of the problem is that we have no mechanisms for working in common and we end up talking in a closed loop of ideas and conversations that cannot on their own instigate change. I would have

After lunch we took part in a break-out session, titled “Rural perspectives on 4

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liked to have seen more conversation on solidarity with fellow citizens, the power of art to connect people and ideas, to unearth the lesser heard voice, to see the world afresh. Surely from shared conversations around the marketisation of social services and the cuts that the global neo-liberal agenda has brought to so many small organisations and individuals we can find common purpose and the means to act for the common good including the arts? You can watch any the conference presentations: Here [+]

____ Issue 9 / Mar 2015 We are pleased that Carmichael House has welcomed us as members and our new contact and address details are: Blue Drum Agency Location: Carmichael House, North Brunswick Street, Dublin 7 Tel: +353 (01) 8771446 [temporary] Mobile: +353-83-3063066 Eleanor +353-87-2334931 Ed Email: blue.drum@yahoo.com Web: www.bluedrum.ie funded as a support structure by

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