Creating a Change : Part 2. Agency - Participation as Power

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, as happens on our Expressive Arts Programmes with Carole Kane); when a participant becomes a facilitator; when a group articulates their desires, concerns and solutions translated into art (under the coordination of Sally Young) ; when folk with very real and visible challenges take to the cat-walk triumphantly in the clothes they have designed and made (this happens almost without fail under Heather Douglas coordination of our Trash Fashion eco-aware fashion programme). 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.

Creating a Change - Part One: Access

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...

April Fools, 2025

April 1st. The day of fools. But for Northern Ireland’s arts sector, April Fools’ Day has lost all novelty—it’s just another date on the calendar when absurdity takes centre stage.

Today marks the beginning of the new financial year. Not a single annually funded arts organisation has received a Letter of Offer from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. No one even knows if they met the threshold to receive funding. We are now officially into a new working year with not a penny of funding in place, no contracts signed, no safety net, no core support from our principal funder - just a hope that something might land in the inbox before insolvency kicks in, or the protective redundancy notices get sent.

Last year, this situation was unprecedented. It was truly shocking. In 25 years, I’d never known such an instance.  Bear in mind that in that quarter of a century, the arts have professionalised massively here. And the whole area of applied creativity is so embedded in every facet of publicly funded arts services right across the country.  But for this to happen again - this year, with all we know, with all we have said, with all the evidence that we continue to lay out? That’s not just alarming any more ; it’s absurd. Who was it that said: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” That’s right, apparently the same fellow who said “Not everything that counts can be counted.” Go figure Einstein!

Given the year we’ve just had, what’s the strategy to take things forward? The Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s 10-Year Strategic Plan, 2024–34 - which had only recently been developed through extensive consultation and which has guided every funding application over the past year, seems to have been effectively pushed aside. Now, whatever you may feel about such strategies , we all need parameters to work within, especially when we anticipate gaining investment from the hard-pressed public purse. And we know that despite that corporate language and the objectives, this is intended to support the creative sector here and all that flows from that. But that sectoral engagement and those ambitions have seemingly been overwritten by just a few lines in a ministerial statement and a Letter of Expectations. And when you compare the broad, ambitious aims of the ACNI strategy - supporting artistic excellence, inclusion, sustainability, and access across all communities - with the minister’s rather minimalist declaration and somewhat vague expectations, whilst the contrast in presentation could not be starker, there seems to be so much alignment in the substantive priorities and direction: wellbeing, inclusion, community engagement, creative participation, and collaboration. So why, then, the realignment? Why the implication that what we have all been doing over the years has somehow failed, when the strategic direction of travel already broadly matches? Priorities such as widening participation, enhancing inclusion, fostering innovation, and contributing to wellbeing are present in both. Given this alignment, it is reasonable to ask: why introduce ambiguity, risk, and delay when the means to deliver those objectives are in place? 

And, if that isn’t the case, what is? Where is the ministerial strategy for the arts… what's the timeline?

Meanwhile, our Programme for Government, for what it's worth, talks of wellbeing. Of tackling inequality. Of cross-departmental collaboration. Of investing in people, place, and opportunity. But how does it square with the fact that not one arts organisation knows if it can keep its staff, deliver its projects, or even pay the electricity bill?

What’s more, every publicly funded arts organisation in this country is governed by unpaid trustees, (directors and board members), whose own personal liability is the guarantee that underpins all these charities. And all publicly-funded arts organisations are charities, with objectives approved by the government, to carry out fundamentally beneficial support to our society. Each and every one of them. Its volunteers who offer oversight to them, who are charged with the responsibility to ensure that their charities are run safely and compliantly. What do these people do today, as a whole sector holds its breath…again? Do they have reserves? Is it too risky to operate a charity in this situation, with no surety about anything? Should their risk registers light up red across the board? At what point do these organisations fall foul of charitable legislation around illegal trading? Is this the way good governance works or do those politically charged with supporting the arts bear some responsibility too?

The PfG talks more about enabling sectors to flourish. It talks about innovation, creative industries, skills development, cultural inclusion, and mental health. It gestures toward a vision of a joined-up, vibrant society. But on the ground? The people delivering all that vision: the organisations, volunteers, artists, facilitators, and communities, what do they get?

Yes, this April Fools day, just who are the fools? It's us isn’t it?

Because we are asked to believe. To trust that funding will come, with no guarantee it will. That a strategy is coming. That investment is on its way. Are we deluded? 

Despite it all, the sector endures. It adapts. Perhaps foolishly, it still shows up. But let’s not mistake that faltering resilience for consent. Let's not pretend that the sector's determination is a vote of confidence in all this. People have mortgages, dependents and families, responsibilities… and loads of skill and ambition.

Elsewhere in the UK, investment in culture is being ramped up. Grand announcements. Real money. Concrete commitments. Here? We’re still waiting …

So again: are we the fools?

The ones who still perform on the high wire—with no safety net in place, only protective redundancy notices waiting in the wings? The ones who must keep their balance while the ground beneath them shifts unpredictably? 

The minister first announced “new priorities” back in July 2024. It’s now April 2025. So:

Where is the strategy?

When will we see a draft?

Who has been consulted in its development?

When will the statutory consultation begin?

And what will the timeline be for implementation?

Because if this drags on, we may well find ourselves at the end of 2025, once again facing a December deadline for annual funding applications without a coherent strategy to apply to… And what then? Will it be the same next year? Will this whole sector be asked to suspend disbelief again and accept this narrative, this continuing drama?

And why, having refined so many multiple cultural strategies, reports, and consultative frameworks (culminating in the ground-breaking cross-departmental co-designed Investing in Creative Delivery 2023, which took two years and involved expert input from all corners of culture arts and heritage sectors), does government continue to rewrite the script? Why, when representatives and leaders responded to the challenge and have co-designed and collaboratively developed expressing articulately, objectively, just where culture, arts and heritage are and how they can be better supported, why is all that being sidelined, as we wait for piecemeal strategies, one for the arts, one for culture… all apparently coming soon? 

I recall being at a meeting, way back in 2003, where representatives from across those self-same sectors bemoaned the fact that we continued to have work in silos instead of recognising how interconnected our processes could become and how much more effective our collective creative and community facing support could be. That was 22 years ago. As glaciers recede at a frightening pace across the globe, we can no longer point to their incremental pace…Culture and arts and heritage don't live in isolation  - they live in schools, in hospitals, in youth centres, businesses, in streets and city halls, old people's residential care, as well as theatres, pubs, institutions, museums, libraries, tourist attractions…They underpin who we are and what we do. They are interconnected. They are the very basis of how we see ourselves and how we let others see us. 

And the ministerial Letter of Expectations of February this year, talks about respect, pointedly saying that funding must not support anything “disrespectful of any tradition.” What does that mean? Is it disrespectful to our tradition of making art in our community, our long established customs of supporting truly ground-breaking arts organisations and artists, to now further destabilise the work we do, the work we have shown to be exemplary, compliant with all existing ambitions and objectives; produced year on year despite the worst levels of under-investment in these islands for decades? Does that constitute respect? Is it respectful to the communities of interest, practice or place, communities on the very margins of society, and our artists and artisans, musicians and facilitators, or those whose ethnicity or perhaps disability creates even more obstacles to participate in the cultural life of this place… does it show respect for all our collective traditions and ambitions to have everyone hold their breath, performing a high wire act without a safety net?

Are artists meant to tiptoe quietly around everyone and everything; every interpretation of identity, history, or society? Has the traditional role of art making changed? And if we are to be told that it has, how do we respond? Will we be informed just how in the new strategy? 

And yet, across the water, in Westminster, Jennie Lee’s legacy from 1948 is being invoked again. Lisa Nandy, Secretary of State for DCMS, speaks of arts everywhere, of £270 million in new funding, of a renewed cultural compact with communities. Fit-for-purpose infrastructure. A vision of culture embedded in everyday life. A moment of renewal for citizens of …well not here. Because let’s be absolutely clear - UK arts policy has no impact in Northern Ireland. These announcements don’t trickle down or across. Even when there is a Barnett consequential, would we see any of that additional money that represents that hope of renewal? No,  the funding gets swallowed up in the Northern Ireland block grant, never to be ring-fenced or invested in our local cultural infrastructure. Not a penny of that cultural succour is guaranteed for any artist or organisation, or venue here. Or has there been a statement in that regard that I foolishly missed? Unfortunately, no, there hasn’t. 

So whilst we might applaud the creative ambition of “across the water”, we are not even an audience…just bystanders. 

So maybe that’s the ultimate April Fool’s, beyond the joke. That we keep going. That we do it for love, for community, for passionate belief. That we somehow convince ourselves that holding it all together is enough, is a necessity turned virtue. But is it? The definition of resilience is not being overwhelmed. 

So no, perhaps we shouldn’t smile politely through this one, on this April Fool’s Day…

Five Years On: locking down

March 2020 was a time of huge uncertainty. Information was conflicting, government advice was unclear, and the arts sector—like many others—was left wondering how best to proceed. As CEO of Community Arts Partnership, I found myself facing a difficult decision: whether to wait for official mandates or to act pre-emptively to protect staff, artists, and the communities we served. I consulted our board and impressed on them the urgency I felt. 

We decided to close our doors before government restrictions were enforced. It was not an easy decision. The weight of responsibility was immense, and there was no precedent for a crisis of this magnitude. Where some in the contemporaneous media questioned whether it was necessary, for me and our staff and board, we expressed relief, understanding quickly and sympathetically the seriousness of the situation. That early decision to shut down all direct contact work marked the beginning of a long and challenging road.

Closing the doors was just the first step. The immediate challenge was figuring out how to keep things going in a world that had suddenly shifted online. The scramble to adapt was chaotic: staff members had to set up home offices overnight, artists needed to find new ways to engage with their audiences, and community groups—many of whom relied on face-to-face interaction—had to adjust to digital platforms that were unfamiliar and, in many cases, inadequate for the kind of work they did.

Some aspects of the transition worked better than expected. Digital meetings and collaborative tools became lifelines, allowing work to continue in a way that wouldn’t have been possible even a decade earlier. But there were also gaps. Not all projects could be transferred online, and for some artists, the shift to digital engagement meant an immediate and perilous loss of income and opportunity. We found ways to support. We signposted and we filmed; we edited, we zoomed and then we zoomed some more. The shift wasn’t just logistical; it had a profound emotional and psychological impact on everyone involved. And for the very vulnerable, it meant trying our very best to offer some continuity. 

With everything in flux, maintaining financial stability was of course a critical concern. Arts organisations faced an existential crisis, with many fearing they would not survive. Many artists went into freefall. The government response provided some relief: Northern Ireland received £33 million from the UK’s £1.57 billion Cultural Recovery Fund, which provided emergency grants to many. But it was understandably and regrettably slow. The Culture, Arts & Heritage Recovery Taskforce was established in May 2021 to oversee the sector’s reopening and long-term recovery. These interventions helped sustain many organisations through the worst of the crisis, but they were not a panacea, even if they had all been realised. And for a sector that was already struggling with decades of systemic underinvestment, artists bore the brunt of it. And so they left, or took any job to get by, or went to ground, unhappy, isolated and alone. 

For us in CAP, securing funding meant constant engagement with funders and policymakers, making the case for why community arts mattered even more in a pandemic. Some programmes had to be adapted or scaled back, while others found new life in digital formats. The efforts of the sector were so evident, but so was the vulnerability. 

What began as an emergency measure gradually became a long-term reality. Remote work, once seen as a temporary solution, became an embedded part of how arts organisations function. Even as restrictions eased, many aspects of remote working remained, changing the nature of collaboration and engagement. Even this year, after five years, some of the remote still remains. 

The shift had both positive and negative consequences. On the one hand, it has allowed for greater flexibility, reduced travel time, and enabled wider participation in meetings, workshops and events. On the other, it led to the loss of physical creative spaces, disrupted all the informal networking opportunities, all the chats and craic, and left some artists and many communities feeling utterly isolated, burnt out and vulnerable. The community arts sector, which thrives on in-person interaction, had to find new ways to build connections and foster collaboration.

Beyond the logistical and financial challenges, there was an even greater toll: the human cost. The pandemic took lives. Friends, colleagues, and community members were lost. Not necessarily to Covid 19 but those remote funerals became the only option for so many, stripping away the opportunity for collective mourning and leaving many with that grief unresolved. It also completely shifted school age kids towards even more screen time, on their own or at least, alone in an online connected labyrinth. Many still haven't bounced back from the isolation, the torturous home-schooling and lack of contact with peers and friends. For a great many, the effect of the pandemic will be felt for many years yet. 

The impact of these losses was profound, and the sense of isolation only made it harder to process. Our work in the arts, which is built on relationships and shared experiences, had to navigate not just professional challenges but that deep personal challenge. Even now, five years since it all started, we can all still sense the echoes of that grief and loss. Standing outside, apart.

Looking back, the decision to close down face to face work ahead of government mandates was the right one. It prioritised the health and safety of those we served, even if it came at a cost. It kept vulnerable staff members safe too. But no one knew how long it would all take and while many just lashed out at anything and everything, the careful and considerate took a beat and kept on working.

The pandemic may have indeed forced a re-evaluation of how arts organisations operate, highlighting the sheer immense vulnerability that we all share in times of crisis, but it also put us more in touch with those people and communities already challenged by health issues or those already struggling on the margins. The exacerbation of every deficit and difficulty was the pandemics long lasting price.

Where some aspects of the sector have recovered, others remain in flux. Face to face working is more prized than ever but while digital engagement has reshaped how many work, it has also become way more complicated and indeed, unsure. Spam, junk, scams, clones. They’re all more dangerously rampant than ever now . And AI seems to have only accelerated the level of level of everything - albeit washed in lazy computer generated platitudes and inaccuracies. Reaching out? Please, get a grip!

Remember building back fairer (never mind better, which was a forlorn hope, dashed hopelessly early). As the emergency funds are a thing of the past and everyone is fighting for funds from every possible avenue, the question now is not just how we rebuild, but how we ensure that the lessons of the past five years are not forgotten. How do we create a more sustainable, adaptable, and inclusive arts sector when there is little by way of new investment? How, when the arts have been summarily de-prioritised by our central government in the Assembly's PfG and replaced with top down short term missives about new priorities without any new monies, how do we survive, never mind grow? And how do we honour those that worked so hard and gave so much, at personal and often professional cost, along the way? Five years on, there are more questions than answers. The arts did matter…they should still.