Continuing the series on Community Arts Practice as framed by the Four As: Access, Agency (Participation), Authorship and Active Ownership
If Access is about creating the conditions, Agency is about what happens once people step inside them. It’s the moment when participation turns into something more than presence — when people begin to decide, make, and shape their work on their own terms.
I’ve been watching how the language of practice shifts for decades, and I’ve seen how easily the word participatory seems to sit in the shade of brighter lights, a little dimmed, its sense diluted. Not that long ago it used to mean something altogether more urgent - communities seizing the right to make and share their own culture, amplified by a collective resolve to shift the argument, to express another way. The radicalism reflected vibrant ideas of idealism and empowerment. Now, it often reads as shorthand for becoming part of some highly-defined component of a pre-determined outcome.
Over the intervening years, “participation” has been re-packaged, and re-sold. What began as a challenge to institutional power, born from more radical times of social movements, tenants’ groups, feminist collectives, neighbourhood campaigns; has been absorbed into the more prosaic corporate rhetoric of engagement. Not always, but enough for us to recognise the shift.
Participation may now have become the offer to be included in a performance of inclusion rather than a proactive moment to assert it. Today, in institutions across the globe, many may be invited in, briefly visible in a prefigured moment, reflecting the glittering marvel of some elevated or extended performance, exhibition or expression. The resulting artwork may travel, or open up to herald a huge civic event; but the agency rarely does.
Community arts, in its own tradition, was never about “giving people access” to culture. It was about people producing culture, asserting presence in a system that had largely written them out, or made ‘hard to reach’. That difference still matters, because it defines whether the work is democratic or merely decorative. Agency, in this sense, is the antidote to the thinly participatory . It insists that creative involvement must carry consequence — that the act of making should alter the balance of creative power, however slightly, in this voicing of cultural democracy, in the hopeful search for actual power and real change.
In these relationships, the interplay of Agency is crucial. The distinction between cultural democracy and democratising culture isn't just semantic. There is a polarity in how power and agency are channelled. This distinction is often misunderstood — especially by policymakers and institutions who can often equate audience reach with democratic value. Now of course, I have enjoyed watching National Theatre productions in local cinemas but does that democratise culture as many proponents would hold , or does it simply distribute it , relocating the same hierarchies into new spaces without altering who holds the creative authorship or indeed authority? Recent findings suggest that it does drive audiences which is great, but to democratise creativity needs that magic ingredient still - Agency.
Real cultural democracy isn’t achieved by widening consumption; it’s achieved by widening creativity. Witnessing great art together is incredibly inspiring and enjoyable. It can bond, elevate, bring tears to our eyes and give us shared, unforgettable moments. But it doesn’t change the fundamental relationship between those who make and those who receive. Cultural democracy begins only when people can decide, make, and interpret for themselves - when art becomes a shared language rather than a broadcast signal.
This is where community arts, at its best, can quietly and elegantly, or noisily and angrily, subvert that dynamic. It doesn’t just move culture around; it relocates control. It asks who gets to define notions of “excellence” and “value”, who speaks for whom, and how creativity might operate as a common right rather than a curated privilege.
In that sense, cultural democracy isn’t a service to be delivered but a structure to be built; it's a way of ensuring that imagination and power can circulate together. It’s closer to what Raymond Williams meant when he wrote that “culture is ordinary”: made collectively, grounded in everyday experience, and shared in the making. Distributing culture can fill screens; democratising culture can change lives.
In community arts, Agency rarely appears out of nowhere. It is cultivated, coaxed, made possible by conditions that precede it. It is strategic, or at least always seeks to be. Strategic in that it strategises how to advance ideas, concepts and solutions, often in organised yet organic processes. And at the heart of that process - perhaps surprisingly - is the collaboration and partnership between the artist-facilitator and the newly emerging artistry of the participant. It is a cooperative, generous, sharing of skills and insight. It is also that recognition of collective working, among the group. It relies on friendliness. Not superficial niceness or polite small talk, but a deeper evolutionary trait: our natural inclination to cooperate, to trust, to form bonds, to imagine ourselves in relation to one another. This is what Rutger Bregman (whose work challenges all aspects of policy and society), notes as “the survival of the friendliest.” And it is perhaps the most underestimated aspect of community arts practice.
Chairs are arranged in circles rather than rows. Laughter, or at least the beginnings of it. The first actions are always invitations, seeking reponses. The room becomes a shared space, held gently, without coercion or hierarchy. What is being established here is not technique; it is friendliness and collaboration as method. This is what lowers people’s defences enough for agency to take hold. It is friendliness that says: “You are safe. You belong. Your contribution matters.”
Agency cannot grow without that safe, shared nurturing space that invites participation. Friendliness is an ethic that says people deserve the chance to try things and to make mistakes. Mistakes are a key part of learning. Overcoming them is where transformative creativity flourishes, and the dignity of that process with those people is a resource. This is all big stuff. Not just programmes of workshops, not diversions or decorations, but deeply ethical activities that promote personal and social good. At their most basic, that’s what community arts always seeks to bring. And that's a big responsibility too.
Process and Product
This tension has haunted community arts from the beginning. Should the work be judged by the finished artefact, by the eye of the professional, the critic, or by the process that gave rise to it? That debate, at heart, is about where we locate value and it's something that in our current local policy context, is becoming more and more relevant once again, as the public value of the arts is interrogated and re-moulded, particularly, currently, in the increasingly pressurised funding and policy environment in which the arts operate here. The current minister with responsibility for the arts and his Dept for Communities have developed new frameworks for creative endeavour and of course, much needed public resources. Within those frameworks, community arts offers real scope to offer significant community transformation. Let’s hope that the ensuing policies recognise that.
For some, the artwork’s worth lies in its aesthetic quality — the technique, the finish, the realisation, the comparison to professional standards. For others — myself among them — the value can often lie elsewhere, often in the making itself, in the encounters, the risks taken, the ways people discover what they can do and who they might become through creating together and the realisation of their creative ambition.
But process and product aren’t opposites. They exist in tension, each testing and strengthening the other. In CAP, we host that full spectrum every day. Projects like Poetry in Motion Community are built around participation — people finding their voice, often for the first time, through dialogue, facilitation and shared discovery. And within that, initiatives like the Seamus Heaney Awards for New Writing celebrate the excellence of the work produced, recognising that emerging community voices can achieve standards equal to any professional benchmark. These two ends of the spectrum are not contradictory; they are complementary, a creative dynamic within one community arts programme. The participatory process nourishes that excellence, and the excellence in turn amplifies the benefit and value of the process.
In community arts, process is part of the artwork. The performance, the mural, the poem, or the film isn’t simply an output — it’s a container for all the conversations, compromises and small acts of courage and generosity that produced it. When communities, of place or interest, lead the process, the resulting work has a different kind of beauty: social, collective, assertive, real.
I’ve seen pieces that might never hang in many a gallery but which hold more truth than anything on its walls. The power of those works isn’t polish; it’s presence. They carry those fundamental elements of authorship, testimony and ownership — all the things that make art really matter in people’s lives.
But there has been a challenge levelled at arts professionals over recent decades, as much of the arts sector has been pulled toward a highly instrumentalised logic. Funding, policy and public discourse increasingly expect the arts to demonstrate value through measurable outputs: economic impact, footfall, audience metrics, regeneration goals or alignment with specific strategic priorities. As artefacts struggle to be measured against such yardsticks in and of themselves, so process and the shifted notions of participation have come into play, clumsily attempting to assign value.
While such measures have their place and have become the currency of funding creativity, they can narrow our understanding of what the arts are for. Creativity becomes treated as a tool for external objectives rather than a meaningful human process in its own right. In this climate, time-intensive relational work - the kind that grows trust, confidence and agency is difficult to quantify and often escapes spreadsheet measurements.
In community arts, practitioners know that the most significant outcomes often arise from processes which unfold gradually: a group finding its rhythm, an individual gaining confidence, a story being shared for the first time, a sense of belonging emerging. These forms of change are tangible but not always easily measured, and they don’t reduce neatly to targets or outputs.
This resistance to purely instrumental thinking has occasionally led to misunderstanding. Critics sometimes label community arts as a form of “social engineering”, as though participants are being guided towards predetermined behaviours or ideas. But this misunderstands the ethos entirely. Social engineering relies on control. Community arts relies on invitation — on creating the conditions in which participants discover their own agency and shape their own contributions. It decentralises authority rather than consolidating it. In this sense, community arts offers a quiet but important counterweight to instrumentalism. It recentres the humanity of creativity: the connection, exploration, authorship and the slow building of confidence... the Agency. Whilst these are often described as soft outcomes; they are actually the foundations on which deeper social change and human development rests.
By valuing process alongside product, and by trusting people to steer their own creative journeys, community arts expands the conversation about what the arts are for. It reminds us that creative work is at its most powerful when it strengthens agency — helping people recognise their capacity to speak, act, and contribute meaningfully to their communities.
This is not a detour from public purpose. I have believed whole-heartedly for well over 25 years that it is a renewal of that public purpose. In a cultural landscape that can too easily equate value with measurability, community arts quietly insists that the most transformative changes often start in spaces where people are allowed - and encouraged - to be fully human and that their art is dignified with recognition.
Owen Kelly, another great collaborator and contributor to the whole sphere of community arts, with whom we worked some years ago, is of course right to say that community art is “the organised expression of a community’s culture by and for that community.” For some that is problematic. And Owen said plenty more besides and I would encourage anyone with a community curiosity to read his Storming the Citadels - it speaks to a particular moment when things really shifted. But of course, today it’s still individuals who make community and things are shifting once again. And as individualism expands exponentially through consumerism and social media and our planet is in peril, making community locally becomes ever more important. When that creativity takes shape in those local community groups and between their members, the product isn’t diminished by its collective making; it’s amplified by it. An anthology of poetry produced by a community-based organisation isn’t just another publication of writing, but a collective assertion of grass roots energy and creative courage. The skill of the artist facilitating processes in local community spaces up and down the country, does not necessarily lie in perfect techniques and high-flown creative concepts (though it might) but more often than not, it's in the sensitive choreography of trust, voice and exchange. It's that curation by an artist, that act of taking care.
As our friend and collaborator François Matarasso has described it, the beauty of participatory art often lies in what it enables rather than what it displays. The work’s aesthetic and social power aren’t separate — they feed each other. That relationship is the art form, perhaps not all of it, but certainly the dynamic that propels it.
Practising Agency
And I’ve seen that Agency is deepened when people begin to use that creative process as rehearsal for their own personal and collective freedom. It has life and essence. It’s the moment a participant decides the direction of a project, questions its assumptions, or starts something of their own. It’s that ignition of ideas being translated onto a page, a wall, or a recording device. Individually and collectively, it’s that activation, from passive to active. It's that confidence. And that can be a powerful and daunting moment for many. But once realised, it can set a tone for years and years. For lifetimes in fact.
In CAP, I’ve seen it when a workshop becomes a proclamation; when a participant becomes a facilitator; when a group articulates their desires, concerns and solutions translated into art; when folk with very real and visible challenges take to the cat-walk triumphantly in the clothes they have designed and made. I have the privilege to see that year after year. It's a powerful and poignant moment. And that Agency isn’t always polite — it argues, it reshapes and insists on so many other possibilities and connections. It fights for recognition. It’s what Augusto Boal called turning the “spectator into protagonist” — creativity as the practice of democracy, participating in the human right of making culture.
Agency also lives in the textures and rhythms of the everyday homeplace. I think of Mary Jane Jacob, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), with whom we had the pleasure and privilege to work back in 2010/2011. Her practice further illustrated to me that agency is something lived, negotiated and made visible in the relationships between people, not just in creative practice but in our own places. Jacob’s approach has always pushed beyond the idea of engagement and into the realm of real shared authorship — art not as something delivered to a community, but something brought into being with them. She understood that public art, at its best, emerges from conversation, conflict, cooperation and care. In her projects, agency wasn’t a by-product; it was the medium. Communities shaped the direction, the meaning, even the purpose of the work. Being alongside her and understanding her findings firsthand, further demonstrated to me that creativity becomes transformative only when the people most affected by a place are also shaping what happens in it — and that this is where participation becomes power. New Belfast and CAP strived to do the same on successive Belfast Wheel projects that can be seen across the city. This logic may all seem so basic and naive, but it is a fundamental principle that powerful elites and commercial interests do not always recognise and of course, very often actively resist and displace. But that space, properly nurtured and supported, is where citizens collectively collaborate on an idea that imagines positive change and then create that shift. It is the pivot that we see in creative work all the time, where a point of true collaboration is reached and thereafter, the next development stages of community arts practice can actually flourish - authorship and ownership. An early programme coordinator of New Belfast Community Arts Initiative (the parent charity of CAP), the late-lamented and redoubtable Joe Sheehy, who I had the pleasure to work with, was very taken with Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point. Joe spoke about it and wrote about, along with many insights from the mighty John Berger too. And so that was the moment that all of us in the programme were primed to watch out for, anticipating that paradigm shift. That was golden.
Here, in our wee corner of it all, this whole area of agency has always been fraught with intersections, expectations and frustrations. Against a backdrop of decades of conflict, the ensuing trans-generational trauma, socio-economic disadvantage and splintering sclerotic politics, our communities have been managed and monitored more often than they have been trusted. But for so many here, agency means challenging that inheritance by insisting that people are not just beneficiaries in a deficit model of loss and of lack, but real partners where actual consultations can lead to change, not compliance with a foregone conclusion. Here, the echoes of making peace resound in making art and vice versa. Through the arts, I’ve watched people move from silence to self-representation, from waiting for permission to taking initiative. That is agency at its most radical, its most transformative: not only participation in the arts, but participation through the arts in shaping society itself, rehearsing solutions for people in their own spaces, with their own expression. It extends far further than a workshop programme. It offers promise but also risk. It recognises how to reflect and activate not just ideas but people and places. As I said, it has consequence and importance and because of that, the stakes are high because the risks are real.
And so when I talk about Agency, I’m talking about participation with power. Not attendance, not token inclusion, not providing a backstory for an artwork, but the lived experience of people using creativity to redefine their place in the narrative, in their space, in the world. In community arts, we are recognising what makes humans human. We are striving to support the conditions for agency to take root.
And of course, from Agency, everything else becomes possible. It’s where imagination becomes self-determination. It’s what turns “we took part” into “we belong.” And in the processes of community arts and indeed, as in so many aspects of our lives, Agency is not granted, it’s grown, through developing trust, in collaboration, in tension, in consensus, in small steps and big leaps. Or of course, it’s snatched eagerly by community groups desperate to articulate change and express their vision, in a hard-won opportunity to engage.
Each time I see Agency take hold, it reminds me that participation is never the end of the story. Once people start shaping, questioning, and leading, something else starts to emerge — the right, and the confidence, to author. That’s the next stage of the community arts journey that I’ll look at next month. If Access builds the conditions and Agency animates them, then Authorship is the moment when people begin to narrate their own lives — to speak from within their experience rather than being spoken for, whatever that experience may be. It’s where we renew the creative courage of children (at whatever age we may be), where the timid and humble channel their fear into expression, where the awkward beat becomes a rhythm, where the anger becomes the drama, where the hurt and the marginal start to navigate a different path to health and into the light. It can be a delicate transition or an abrupt irrestible one, but it will be powerful. Because once you’ve found your voice, the next question is always the same: what do you say, who gets to hear it, and what change will that bring… It's the insistence of what really matters and what actually nurtures. It’s transformational.
The arts matter.
