Twenty-three years ago last month, I had the privilege of becoming the leader of a community arts organisation. I had been working in community contexts for years before, but this was different. This was an almost unique opportunity to help not just define where art and social purpose met — but to make something happen, where our creativity had to prove itself, in the lives and places of people too often left out of the cultural conversation. To make a New Belfast.
The great, foundational platform of Community Arts Forum, established in 1995 by Martin Lynch and later guided by Heather Floyd, had arrived at a very unique, succinct and elegant way of describing everything that was community arts - Access, Participation, Authorship and Ownership. I was enchanted not only at the simplicity, but the universality and profundity those 4 words allowed. Those 4 words became everything to me, professionally and artistically, over more than 25 years. They still guide me today and test my work but they also offer a frame of reference as to how our world has caught up with that vision and perhaps ignored the valuable insights they offered.
In the years since, Access has come to mean something far more complex than many may first have imagined, but others may have also tried to narrow the definition too. It’s not just about opening doors - it's not just accessibility (which is also central to its meaning) - it’s also about elbowing your way into a discourse and trying to change the structures that decide who gets a key to the door in the first place.
In these next months of blogs , I will try to reframe those four powerful and interconnecting words into a series, to re-examine a quarter of a century of creative determination - from above and below - and where we find ourselves today. It's a small reflection of policy and outcomes in my own corner of the sector.
A New Chapter
As I write, CAP is in motion again — packing boxes, planning moves, negotiating terms and making space for what’s next. Moving premises always makes me think about purpose: what we’ve built, what still matters, and what needs re-imagined.
It always feels like a time of renewal. The CEMENT programme (community, engagement, mentoring, networking and training) is gathering pace, new partnerships are forming, and our move signals more than a change of address — it’s a chance to restate what community arts mean in a society that’s showing its age; fraying at the edges and increasingly fiscally fragile.
Over the months ahead, I’ll use this space to explore what I’ve now come to call the Four A’s: Access, Agency, Authorship and Active Ownership. They describe not just how participation happens, but how creativity becomes social action — how people move from being invited in, to leading, shaping and sustaining the work themselves.
These pieces aren’t manifestos so much as reflections from practice — part memory, part provocation — written as we seek to settle into a new home and a new phase. My hope is that they’ll help clarify where we stand, and how community arts can keep acting as a small but vital force for renewal. And to invite others to carry that momentum forward.
I had been working in community and development contexts for years before — in neighbourhoods, even countries, where creativity was often the only bright light left on — but running an organisation was different.
I began to understand Access not as a gesture or an outcome to report, but as a lifelong act of translation: between policy and people, between those who hold resources and those who hold stories, between the rhetoric of inclusion and the lived reality of connection.
So Access is not just another noun, nor another verb — it's something you do, and keep doing. It’s what happens when you see an opportunity that doesn’t yet exist and set about creating it. In Northern Ireland and everywhere else, that act of creation has always been political (big or small 'p'), even when it doesn’t look like it. That was the powerful beauty and elegant ignition of Martin Lynch’s vision for community arts here.
We live in a place where the divisions of history overlap with the inequalities of disadvantage; where the peace walls and the dole queues often trace the same terrain. To speak about Access in such a context is to confront the deep architecture of exclusion: not just who gets to participate, but whose imagination is resourced, whose future is planned for. And that ‘them and us’, is as vertical as it is horizontal. It isn’t about two traditions, but it isn’t not about them either, if that makes sense. It's about more and much less.
When I started at New Belfast Community Arts in 2000, access began as inclusion. But it soon translated as intervention. Today still, when government systems fail to provide even the basics — when NHS waiting lists stretch into years, when teachers are patching windows with cardboard to keep classrooms draught-free; then the idea of access to culture becomes a test of what we still believe a public life should really be. Access becomes a mirror, reflecting who and what we are prepared to leave behind. It measures not only how many people attend a workshop or exhibition, but the moral reach of our institutions - our willingness to imagine rights as something that must be shared, not rationed.
When communities remain under-served decade after decade, this is not a bureaucratic oversight; it is a declaration of priorities. At a time when our Programme for Government is titled ‘Doing What Matters Most’, the implication is easy to read. The pattern of exclusion reveals our values far more truthfully than any governmental plan.
As the great Raymond Williams put it, “Culture is ordinary: that is where we must start.”
Access, in that spirit, asks whether our cultural systems have really started there — with the ordinary, the overlooked, the unheard, the marginal...the other.
Much of my working life therefore has been spent in translation: between the communities we serve, the artists we support and the policymakers who struggle to serve them all.
Every funding application, every consultation, every partnership is a small act of reinterpretation: taking the language of governance, the funder, the policy, and turning it toward human experience.
That’s what access work often looks like - unglamorous, iterative, sometimes exhausting. That there is the spirit of community arts.
It’s the art of converting intention into possibility, of finding the gaps in the system and quietly widening them until someone else can step through. There is a kind of grace in that persistence, but also a cost. I am lucky that I get to witness the graciousness of community artists’ generosity and impact all the time. Part of my role as an advocate is to sometimes live between two worlds: one that speaks in metrics, and one that voices need. The trick is not to let the first silence the second. And if one parrots the language of the neoliberal, one needs to be vigilant not to adopt their grammar.
That’s why Williams still matters to me. In Resources of Hope, published after his death, he wrote that “to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.” Those words feel like a quiet manifesto for community arts - the work of making hope possible, not through slogans, but through the steady building of pathways into creativity.
Access can be imagined as a threshold - once taken, everything can change. For CAP, access has always meant shaping and supporting the pathway beyond: lobbying for changes in policy, reframing funding, and reinterpreting opportunities for “participation” so that it means genuine authorship can flourish. After that, some stakehold is established, the legacy of ownership. All of which I'll offer my take in future posts.
Access is not about bringing people into "our world of the arts", that's the grab-hold language of ‘outreach’. It’s about expanding that world until it already includes them all. That’s why this work can’t be detached from questions of social justice, economy, or belonging.
When we talk about access, we are talking about redistribution; of resources, of visibility, of equity. We are talking about cultural democracy not as an aspiration, but as infrastructure: the connective tissue of a society that still believes in itself.
Another great foundational quote from Williams is that “the test of a true democracy is not how it speaks to the powerful, but how it listens to the ordinary.”
I think about that often. The “ordinary” here have endured extraordinary things; from the grinding marginalisation of socio-economic disadvantage, to the inheritance of trauma from previous generations, to the hateful ‘othering’ of communities struggling for an equitable foothold in this place.
Yet in every community we work with, I see imagination at work: stubborn, generous, resourceful, talented - surviving against the odds. That is where access resides too... not with policy documents but with the quiet courage of people still willing to make and share meaning together. That is culture.
In a time when so much feels broken - when public life itself seems to be unravelling with every stark warning of loss, cuts and closure - with every bewidering technological broadens a digital divide - Access also becomes an act of faith. Faith in the idea that creativity is not what we reach for when life improves, but part of how we actually improve life. Faith in the idea that democracy is not only a vote, but a voice - and that every act of making, however small, is a rehearsal for that voice being heard.
So, when we speak about Access now, we should mean possibility. We should mean the stubborn refusal to accept that austerity should extend to the imagination. Access is not just the beginning of the process; it’s the measure of our cultural democracy and the test of our civic hope.
PS We had a great initial session of ReImagining Arts Advoacy on the 10th October at QUB Centre for Ethnography, with my comrades Sara Walmsley and Mairead Duffy and host of others. More to come on that...
