Active Ownership
The fourth stage of the Four A’s
As I have explained before, when the Community Arts Forum set about trying to articulate what community arts actually meant in the late 1990s, it quickly became clear that no it would struggle to find a single definition that would work. There were manifestos, philosophies, ideologies, motivations, practices and processes which together could be understood as community arts. Some emphasised empowerment and participation, others cultural democracy, others the social value of creative expression. But not one overarching, readily accessible term could accommodate all.
The Community Arts Forum itself had only recently been established, in 1995, reflecting a growing recognition that practitioners across Northern Ireland needed a way to share experience, support one another and advocate together for the work taking place in communities.
This was Northern Ireland emerging from decades of conflict. The ceasefires of 1994 had created the first space for reflection and reconstruction in a generation, and by the late 1990s the negotiations that would eventually lead to the Good Friday Agreement were gaining pace. Communities that had endured violence, division and economic stagnation were now being asked to imagine a different future. And artists were the imagineers of that future.
So of course, many in the creative community understood that this moment required more than just political settlement. It required places - safe, secure, supportive places - where people could encounter one another again, where stories could be told and heard, and where communities could begin to rebuild confidence and shared cultural life…maybe.
Community arts offered precisely those spaces.
By the mid -1990s Belfast already possessed a diverse range of community arts groupings. Creative work was taking place across neighbourhood organisations, festivals, youth initiatives and artist-led projects.
Groups such as Beat Initiative were working with young people through music and carnival projects, while Belfast Exposed Photography had developed a distinctive model of socially engaged photography rooted in community storytelling.
Artist-led initiatives such as Catalyst Arts created experimental spaces for emerging practitioners, while theatre companies including Kabosh and Replay developed work engaging directly with schools and specific communities.
Participatory arts also flourished through organisations such as Open Arts, CAF and Belfast Community Circus, which opened up creative opportunities to people who had rarely been represented within the cultural institutions of the city up to that time..
Festivals played an equally important role in shaping cultural life within communities. Programmes from Féile an Phobail and Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival demonstrated the scale and vitality of community-led creative expression and the desire for local audiences to see emerging international talent come to the city in more intimate shows, priced accessible and organised sensitively. There were countless smaller neighbourhood arts projects unfolding across community centres and youth clubs across the city too. But it wasn’t all community arts… it wasn’t necessarily participatory practice either.
It was this vibrant energetic landscape that François Matarasso and John Chell sought to document in their Comedia study Vital Signs: Mapping Community Arts in Belfast in 1998. The report made visible a landscape of organisations, practitioners and communities already shaping their own cultural expression. Within all this energy, the defining local characteristics of community arts practice were emerging.
For a society emerging from conflict, recognition of that Commedia report and visibility it provided really mattered. It demonstrated that the term ‘community arts’ was not peripheral cultural activity but part of the wider civic effort to rebuild confidence, dialogue and cultural participation.
From the small workshops and community festivals, from rehearsal rooms and youth clubs, from conversations unfolding through photography, theatre, music and storytelling, certain patterns gradually emerged. Community arts resisted easy definition, yet its practice revealed a quiet structure. Doors had to be opened. Confidence had to be nurtured. Voices had to be listened to and trusted. And ultimately, the work had to belong to the people who created it. Simple enough sounding perhaps.
Reflecting on these experiences over time, CAF elegantly began to recognise these elements as stages within a successful community arts process, that scaling up, step by step, stage by stage, is what I have described as the Four As.
Access wasn’t just about opening a door. It was about ensuring that the opportunity existed in the first place. About advocacy, funding, infrastructure, public will. About insisting that culture is not the preserve of the fortunate few but something that must be resourced and defended so that it is genuinely available.
Agency wasn’t just about attendance. It was about people recognising that they are not recipients of culture but actors within it. That they can decide, respond, refuse, experiment and shape the direction of the creative work that unfolds.
Authorship was never meant as a metaphor. It was the recognition that the artwork, and its meaning, belongs to those who make it. That creative judgement, lived experience and artistic instinct are not dictated to by creative authority, or pre-defined in a dot to dot puzzle that limits the scope of creative work. The community arts movement of the late 1990s in Belfast knew that people had to be enabled to define their own way of working and being, in their own words. And that holds as firmly today as it did then. That is the point at which the work ceases to belong to a process and becomes something collectively held by those who created it.
You hear it in the language people use,where the ‘workshop’ becomes ‘Our Mosaic’ or the photography programme gets called ‘Our Exhibition’. The creative authority has shifted. That participatory power has been rightly relocated.
Active Ownership is therefore not simply a desirable outcome. It is the natural culmination of this process, this scaling up trajectory of community creativity, rooted in autonomy, democratic agency and shared responsibility.
We all drew as children. Few of us are given the space to do so as adults. We sang. We imagined. We designed, sewed and stitched. We wrote stories and poems. Community arts is not an attempt to return us to what we may once have learned in school. It is an attempt to reignite that ability to create and express our own ideas within a supportive and generous space.
And in well-supported programmes, facilitated by sensitive, skilled and thoughtful community artists, that ignition begins to take hold, supported by sensitive and skilled artists. Because the crucial role of the community artist is not simply technical. It is relational. It requires patience, humility and attentiveness. It requires the ability to listen deeply, gently, supportively and to recognise potential where others might overlook it, and to hold a space where tentative confidence can slowly grow.
And as I have said before, there is a constant quiet generosity at the heart of this work. The artist brings themselves, their craft, their experience and their imagination into a community setting not to impose a process, but to release it. Their skill is in the chat, the regard, the attention to detail, the understanding of where a group's collective confidence suddenly deepens, where the stepchange happens. Or recognising when the works stalls, hits shallows that hadn’t been anticipated. And then enable ways to navigate back, to nurture confidence again and ultimately share their tools of creative expression with their group. Acts of kindness and generosity. So central to the community artists way of working.
And when all this is done at all successfully, truly remarkable things happen. The creative power circulates. Participants, those that were so tentative at the start, perhaps even dismissive of their having any chance to achieve, now see their contribution unfold and become that confident authorship. The work becomes shared, and then, owned. ‘What’s Her Name’s workshop’ becomes ‘Our Film’, ‘Our Mosaic’, ‘Our Mural’.
The generosity of these practitioners cannot be understated. It is one of the great strengths of community arts, but it also places enormous demands on those who choose to work in this way. The skills required are subtle and complex. Facilitation, artistic integrity, social awareness, empathy and resilience must all be held in balance. The accomplished community artist listens, guides, pivots and entreats - over and over. Nudging, responding, resetting and recharging…perhaps in the space of one session. It is remarkable work and as you may understand, not highly paid but massively valued. There is no need to remind you that average earning for our artists here is around £12,000 pa which is basically minimum wage. Whereas these practitioners are some of the most socially skilled and creatively courageous people in our society.
It is precisely for that reason that CAP established the CEMENT programme. CEMENT (Community Engagement, Mentoring, Education, Networking and Training) was created to support the development of community artists themselves - to mentor practitioners, strengthen facilitation skills and sustain the generosity of practice that this work requires. Community arts depends on artists who are willing to share their craft and their skills, time and energy, and their creative authority. That is not something that happens by accident. It must be nurtured, supported and passed on to another generation of dedicated and generous community artists, skilled and sensitive to the challenge.
In that sense, the artist remains central to the process. Not as the owner of the work, but as its catalyst, its alchemist. And when that catalyst is present - when the right artist meets the right community at the right moment - the spark of creativity can become something much larger. It can become a beacon that communities themselves continue to tend, actively owning their own projects and processes.
In a world where equality is repeatedly strained, where disparities in wealth and opportunity widen, where ecological impacts fall most heavily on those with the least protection, and where our public institutions struggle to sustain our confidence, community arts offers a different paradigm, a different way to enable ourselves collectively.
Now, I am not suggesting that community arts can replace the public support structures and institutions that sustain us, our health services, our education system, our social protections. Not at all. Those structures remain absolutely essential and must be defended and strengthened.
But community arts can show us something equally important. It shows how we can come together creatively to address the issues we face, to heal wounds that may otherwise remain unspoken, and to assert our rights and our dignity in positive ways. It demonstrates that cultural democracy remains alive to our needs and circumstances, no matter our age, background or social position. It shows us self-reliance. It offers us power. It creates change.
And when people are given the opportunity to participate actively in creative processes, something more begins to happen.
Agency improves wellbeing.
Shared authorship builds confidence.
Collective ownership strengthens social connection.
The act of making something together, a song, a story, an exhibition, a performance, restores a sense of capability that many people have been denied or have quietly lost over time. It reminds us that our voices matter, that our experiences have value, and that we are capable of contributing to the cultural life of our communities. These are not small outcomes. They speak directly to our health and wellbeing as individuals and as a society.
Loneliness diminishes when people create together.
Confidence grows when ideas are heard and respected.
Communities strengthen when people feel they have a stake in shaping the cultural spaces around them.
Not rocket science - just observable facts.
So in that sense, community arts is not simply about creativity. It is about connection, confidence and collective strength. It supports our wellbeing not by prescribing solutions, but by enabling people to rediscover their own capacity to imagine, to express and to participate.
And that in turn may be one of the most valuable contributions we can make to the health of our community and our shared society at this or any time.
Community arts transform lives.
