Remembering Geoff Harden

It was lovely to see Geoff Harden’s name pop up in the Belfast Telegraph this week amid all the Fleadh excitement. All the more poignant, because this September, it will be twenty years since our friend and colleague left us.

Twenty years. Hard to credit really.

For decades, anyone who had been to any folk or trad gig in the city had seen Geoff. He may even have booked the act. He would probably interview them or at the very least, have a pint or two with them after the gig. Many others of course knew him through community arts, although it was never really possible to separate the community arts man, the folk man, the broadcaster, the organiser, the archivist or the man trying to make the accounts reconcile at the end of the month.

He joined what was then the brand new New Belfast Community Arts Initiative as a Project Coordinator on the This Is Me programme in 2000. In 2003 he became our Finance Manager, and there was something wonderfully Geoff about watching this encyclopaedic folk music figure beavering away at reconciliations and spreadsheets while simultaneously quietly organising the Mid Ulster Folk Festival or preparing his radio programme, or plotting whatever musical adventure was next. And he thought I believed he was playing Solitaire! 

I recall Geoff’s excitement at attending a folk festival in Nova Scotia. Or indeed, watching him beam with joy as any artist took to the stage. He enjoyed taking photographs (always the archivist) and when the films got processed (remember them days) , he talked us through each pic over lunch. His enthusiasm for folk music and grass roots arts was infectious. 

He had a heart of corn. A great big sentimental streak allied to a formidable knowledge of music, an endless curiosity about folk (people and music), and an instinct for collecting and sharing stories. He could be wonderfully enthusiastic and in the next breath , sardonic. And enjoyed the craic as he’d poke fun and chuckle. Folk music wasn’t just a part of his life, it was threaded through everything.

And he had already lived a considerable part of the folk music story before he ever arrived at New Belfast Community Arts.
Coming here from England in the 1960s, he became one of those people who simply embedded themselves in the cultural fabric of the place. He had run the Medway Folk Club in his native Kent where he hosted the folk music stars of the day. Of course, along with others, he was synonymous with The Sunflower Folk Club here. He had a fascination for radio and had worked at the BBC in London as well, quietly archiving recordings of singer-songwriters and musicians that otherwise would today be lost. His music archive has allowed many well known artists from back in the day to recover recordings and have them released. 

For years, he had a folk column in the Newsletter and in sometime later, a radio show too... his plummy Home Counties tones only slightly tinged with an Belfast cadence. 

From those early days, Geoff helped create spaces for musicians and music to exist at a time when Belfast wasn’t exactly overflowing with easy opportunities for people to gather together. Even the darkest days of the Troubles didn’t hold him back… it undoubtedly spurred him on. Later he worked with the Folk Festival up at Queen’s University, aided at times by our own chairperson Sean McCann, a great friend of Geoff. I can recall seeing Geoff buzzing around the Staff Common Room at Queen’s one time, making last-minute adjustments and sorting tickets or something, resplendent in his Folk Festival sweatshirt - he loved a well-logoed sweatshirt did Geoff. He was, as they say, in his element.

Which is why the Fleadh fever feels all the more poignant … twenty years since his passing.
Watching Belfast absolutely heaving with music and audiences during the Fleadh — people playing on in huge stages and on streets, in bars, on corners,  I can’t help thinking about the generations who kept making, promoting and sharing music here when the city was a very different place. Along with his great counterpart Neil Johnston, they were in the heart of it.

Geoff Harden was true champion.

Not because he would ever have claimed some grand historical role for himself. He left that to his one-time flatmate and pal Terri Hooley. No, quite the opposite. He got on with things. Programmes needed made, musicians needed booked, recordings needed preserved, radio shows needed prepared, festivals needed organised.

New Belfast’s books got reconciled to the penny. 

And his wife and three kids were of course music fans too - well... they had to be! 

So amongst all the wonderful vibes around Belfast this week with the Fleadh, it has been good to have him wander back into our thoughts.

Twenty years this September.

Still missed. Still talked about. And, I’m glad to say, still part of the story. 

Our Unsung Hero, Geoff Harden  (8 July 1943 – 4 September 2006).

Fleadh-bergasted – and thinking about what comes next

It is difficult to overstate the scale and ambition of the Fleadh.

For eight days, until next Sunday, Belfast has become one big cultural stage. Music and songs spill from concert halls into pubs, venues, street corners, hotels and public spaces. Formal performances sit alongside impromptu sessions. Competitors arrive from across Ireland and around the world to take part in traditional music, song, dance and language competitions, while audiences wander through a programme of more than 200 events spread across venues and neighbourhoods.

There are great performers and emerging talents; children carrying instruments as big as themselves and players whose mastery has been shaped across lifetimes. There are concerts, céilis, workshops, competitions, gigs on the street, seisiún and new musical connections that can only happen when musicians find one another. Friendships will be made and songs will be written. 

The range is truly breathtaking, almost overwhelming in fact.

Way more than a festival, the Fleadh is like a temporary cultural townland within a city: participatory, intergenerational, intercontinental and diverse. This week, the distinction between performer and audience starts to blur. The music isn’t confined to the main stage. It appears around the next corner, down an alley, or in venues, big and small. 

It is a remarkable logistical and cultural undertaking. Belfast City Council, Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann, Ards CCÉ and a network of partners, venues, performers, workers and volunteers have attempted something enormously ambitious. They have not simply brought a large event to Belfast; they have allowed the Fleadh to occupy the city, opening it to visitors while encouraging residents and communities to see themselves within it.

The emphasis upon accessibility, families, local activity and cross-community participation matters too. Belfast’s musical and cultural identity is complicated, rich and of course drawn from more than one tradition. The wider programme has sought to reflect that. Maith thú 

It is, in the fullest and most complimentary sense of the word, Fleadh-bergasting.

And the impact may be breathtaking as well.

According to Belfast City Council; around 800,000 visitors are expected to experience the event, with an estimated £53 million in economic benefit anticipated (says DfI in the Irish News).   Hotels, restaurants, pubs, shops, taxis and transport, will all enjoy the effect. The world is tuning in. My uncle contacted me this morning from Australia having watched the news  - he left Belfast decades ago and whilst he has visited regularly, to him, after seeing the Fleadh on his tv in Sydney,  “Belfast is unrecognisable”. I did reassure him that there was still plenty he would remember, but that powerful message is being broadcast to the globe. 

That is unquestionably something to celebrate.

But, (isn’t there always), amid all the music, bustle and entirely justified civic pride, it is worth sparing a thought for the arts organisations in the same city facing funding stagnation and, in some cases, substantial cuts.

The Fleadh does not arrive in a cultural vacuum. When civic cultural managers were bidding for the event, they understood that there was a supportive cultural environment in the city for just such an event. They were undoubtedly confident that sufficient infrastructure was there. And so they programmed accordingly. The wider programme surrounding the Fleadh offers a vibrant representation of not only Belfast but the region’s cultural life: artists, musicians, venues, community organisations, producers, technicians, teachers, volunteers and audiences. The programme draws upon relationships, knowledge and creative practices developed patiently over many years. It can represent and amplify that ecosystem wonderfully, but the Fleadh itself, for all its substantial presence, cannot create or invent it.

And that ecosystem is under considerable pressure.

Many arts organisations have been held in a funding limbo since 2010. Standstill government funding since then has translated into real term cuts, while the costs of salaries, utilities, insurance, buildings and artistic production have continued to rise. Some long-established Belfast organisations are now facing further substantial cuts from the Council at precisely the moment the city is celebrating the scale, vibrancy and economic power of culture.

That seems counterintuitive doesn’t it? 

Now, this is emphatically not an argument against the Fleadh. Belfast should host it. And indeed next year, it promises to be even better. We should enjoy it, support it and recognise the sheer effort involved in bringing an opportunity of this magnitude to the city. Nor should this become another wearisome contest between major events and year-round arts provision. A culturally confident city requires both.

The question is what happens next…

If culture can generate an estimated £53 million for the wider economy in a single extraordinary week, surely the time has come to consider how some of that value can flow back into the cultural ecosystem itself.

The economic benefit will not arrive as a single cheque in the City Hall postbox. It will be felt across hospitality, accommodation, transport, retail and the rest. But public policy can still recognise where that value begins and where it could be most impactful. A meaningful Fleadh legacy could include renewed and sustained investment in the artists, organisations, venues and communities that provide the platform for Belfast to be capable of hosting such events, but also supporting our diverse community of creativity and participation. 

The Fleadh will leave behind memories, friendships, inspiration, new musical discoveries and, very likely, more than a few sore heads!  But its legacy could be greater still. It could pinpoint another moment when Belfast more fully appreciates that cultural vibrancy does not suddenly appear when the banners go up, the stages arrive and the television cameras roll.

It is created and sustained throughout the year—often quietly, and on increasingly precarious resources—by an artistic community working in venues, meanwhile or temporary spaces, schools, studios, parish halls and neighbourhoods across the city.

So enjoy every minute of this extraordinary Fleadh.

But when the last seisiún finishes and the instrument cases finally close, let us ensure that the cultural life so magnificently represented throughout this week is supported to flourish long after the crowds have gone home.

The Arts Matter. Stop the Cuts. Fund the Arts.

Don't Scrap the Play Resource Warehouse - a plea and petition

I was genuinely saddened to hear that Bryson House Arts & Play Scrap Store is to close this June.
Because this is not just the loss of a warehouse.

For decades, the Scrap Store at the Play Resource Warehouse has been one of those rare pieces of civic and creative infrastructure that quietly made creativity more accessible. And for a nominal fee or annual membership, teachers, youth workers, artists, arts organisations, community groups and facilitators could walk through its doors and leave with the raw materials for workshops, projects, festivals, school activities, play sessions and ideas that otherwise may never have happened.  And help the planet at the same time. Because we know, not everything needs to be new. 

Part of the quiet brilliance of the Scrap Store was that it challenged the depressingly widespread disposable consumer culture.  It recognised that imagination does not begin with pristine materials arriving in plastic packaging. Often, it begins with remnants, offcuts, unwanted party-favours and promotional objects and the unexpected textures on discarded rolls of wallpaper,  all waiting to be transformed into something else entirely. One person’s recycling became somebody else’s puppet, sculpture, costume, workshop, theatre set, sensory resource or school project.

That was not simply economical. It was imaginative, environmental, sustainable and humane.
And at a time when schools, arts organisations and community groups are already under enormous financial strain, this closure will simply force many people to spend more money on materials they previously could access affordably and sustainably. 

The Scrap Store helped stretch tiny budgets even further. It allowed facilitators, teachers and artists to experiment and create ambitiously without constantly worrying about retail costs. It allowed this creative activity to flourish sustainably - ethically. A tub of plastic bottle tops, or corporate cast-off printed bags would be destined for a melting down or landfill. But in the hands of artists and participants, they represent creative possibilities, underpinned by a quiet, practical education about recycling and reusing materials and things.  In a place where arts, education and community sectors are continually expected to absorb rising costs with diminishing support, resources like this quietly made participation possible. Today, that matters more and more. And for tomorrow, it's absolutely crucial. 

What makes this proposed closure even more striking is how rare places like Play Resource are across these islands. A scattered network of a handful of scrapstores and creative reuse centres exists across Britain. On the island of Ireland there appears to be only one broadly comparable operation remaining: ReCreate in Dublin. Significantly, groups from Dublin reportedly travelled to Belfast years ago to learn from the Play Resource model developed here. Cork has been trying to establish a scrap store for years. 
So this is not some eccentric side project with little relevance beyond a niche audience. It remains, for this month anyway, a pioneering infrastructure that we can ill-afford to lose.

Many in the arts and community sectors will remember previous campaigns more than a decade ago to protect the Play Resource Centre from closure. People rallied then because they understood something important: once infrastructures like this disappear, they are exceptionally difficult to rebuild.
It is also impossible not to think of Anne O’Donoghue at this moment. Anne was instrumental in establishing the Play Resource Warehouse and understood, long before many others did, the extraordinary social, creative and environmental value held within reusing and recycling, participation and making materials sustainable and accessible. Through the Anne O’Donoghue Award, delivered by Community Arts Partnership on behalf of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, that legacy continues to be recognised today. Which perhaps explains why this news lands so heavily for so many people. 
There is also a wider contradiction here that is difficult to ignore. Bryson House, which swept in to assist Play Resource some years ago, publicly states that part of its charitable purpose is promoting:
 “waste reduction, re-use reclamation, recycling, use of recycled products”
and:
“advancing the education of the public about all aspects of waste generation, waste management and waste recycling”.

Meanwhile, Belfast City Council’s cultural strategy, A City Imagining, speaks about “sustaining and strengthening the city’s cultural ecosystem” while recognising “the increasing importance of environmental responsibility to the lives of the people in the city”.

Yet here we are discussing the possible disappearance of one of the clearest practical examples of those principles in action anywhere in Belfast. Because the Scrap Store is not separate from recycling policy or cultural policy. It sits precisely at the intersection of both.

This was circular economy thinking made tangible, on our doorstep:
materials diverted from waste streams and reimagined through education, creativity, play and community participation.

And it raises an important question not only for Bryson, but for Belfast itself.
If substantial public investment already exists around kerbside recycling, waste management and environmental infrastructure, should part of that same civic ambition not involve protecting and strengthening the community reuse initiatives that give those policies real visible value?
Surely one of the strongest demonstrations of a circular economy is not simply collecting waste more efficiently, but enabling communities, schools and young people to creatively transform what would otherwise be thrown away.

There is also a deeper anxiety sitting beneath all of thisWe have seen important specialist community infrastructures struggle over the years, sometimes rescued temporarily through the intervention of larger bodies acting in good faith and under difficult circumstances, only for the original institution or organisation not survive over the longer term. The experience of An Munia Tober , the Travellers' Resource Centre, may inevitably linger in the background for many people involved in community and cultural work here.

That history may also shape how people respond to news like this. Because while the Scrap Store may represent only a relatively small component within the wider machinery of the Bryson Charitable Group operation, its impact extends far beyond its direct operating costs. The value it generates is dispersed across schools, arts organisations, youth services, community groups, facilitators and families throughout Northern Ireland.

And if it disappears, the pressures do not disappear with it. They are simply transferred to sectors already struggling with constrained budgets, rising costs and continuing uncertainty around public investment. Without the scale or experience to make recycling accessible or at all sustainable.
That is why this feels larger than the closure of a single programme. Because creative life does not only depend on major venues and flagship buildings. It also depends on the smaller, less glamorous infrastructures that make participation possible in classrooms, church halls, youth clubs, festivals and community spaces every single week of the year.

Often, it's the things with the lowest profile that end up carrying the widest impact.

I understand fully that organisations like Bryson are operating under immense pressure. Everyone is. But before one of the very few dedicated creative reuse resources on these islands disappears entirely, surely there is value in pausing long enough to ask whether another way forward might still be possible.
Because resources like this do not merely save waste from landfill. They save the idea of sustainable creativity. 

A public petition supporting the Scrap Store is also currently circulating online at change.org
If you wish to express concern regarding the proposed closure of Bryson Arts & Play Scrap Store, you can contact Bryson Recycling

The Arts Matter. 

Fool me twice... expect the worse

“Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

Fool me a third time… just who exactly should feel ashamed now?

Last year I wrote here that in 2024, the funding situation was unprecedented. It was genuinely shocking. In twenty five years working in the arts sector here, I had never known anything like it. Organisations entered a new financial year without Letters of Offer from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. No confirmation of funding. No contracts. No clarity about whether they would even meet the threshold to continue operating.

For a sector that had spent decades professionalising governance, compliance and delivery, the situation was extraordinary.

Then 2025 arrived and it happened again.

By that stage the shock had begun to give way to something else. Concern, certainly. But also a dawning realisation that what had been presented as an anomaly might actually be becoming a pattern.

And now we find ourselves in 2026, speeding towards the end of another fiscal year with April on the horizon.

At this point, the debate about whether the situation is unprecedented, is academic. Once may be misfortune. Twice may be careless as Oscar might have said. But three years in, the real question becomes something else entirely. Expected?

Because in February 2025 the Minister issued a Letter of Expectations to the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. The implication seemed clear enough. New priorities were being signalled. A tighter, more concerned supervision of the sector would ensue. A revised policy direction for the arts would follow.

And we waited  - in expectation. Sector representatives were subsequently advised in October last year, by the most senior civil servants in charge, that consultation on that policy would begin early in 2026.

Yet here we are.

The Heritage, Culture and Creativity Framework (HCCF) has of course been published (last July in fact, almost a year to the day after we were told to anticipate its development). The indicative budget for DFC was also disclosed and many sent in their consultation documents last year too. The HCC Framework (HCCF) is expansive in tone and somewhat ambitious in its aspirations for the wider cultural landscape. But the specific policy governing the arts sector itself — the framework organisations are actually expected to operate within — remains conspicuously absent.

• There has been no draft policy.
• No consultation
• No timeline.

Which raises a fairly obvious question.

What exactly are we meant to expect now?

Expectations, after all, are not a one-way street. When government outlines expectations for a sector, that sector might reasonably expect something in return: clarity of direction, engagement in shaping policy, and the basic stability required to plan work responsibly.

Instead we have been cautioned not to expect too much from the forthcoming policy itself. It has been suggested that what will emerge will be a policy, rather than a strategy.

In other words, it may describe where government would like the sector to end up, but offer little indication of how that might actually be achieved.

That distinction matters.

A strategy identifies mechanisms, resources, responsibilities and timelines. A policy that simply articulates desirable outcomes without addressing the practicalities of delivery is something rather different. It describes a destination without offering a map. A first class ticket to nowhere if you will.

One might reasonably wonder whether that is what the sector is now expected to organise its future around. A policy that as yet, doesn't exist, despite a gestation of years.

Meanwhile the political calendar is quietly ticking away, becoming more and more audible with each party conference  - the manifestos are being thought about, the rhetoric honed anticipated a bitter campaign in the run up to elections next May.  Anyone familiar with the rhythms of government understands what that implies. Policy development takes time. Consultation takes time. Implementation certainly takes time.

So if consultation on an arts policy has not yet begun, how exactly will it translate into meaningful change before this mandate expires in less than a year? Or should we be relieved that that's the case?

As seems more likely now,  are we drifting toward yet another funding cycle without political direction for the arts?

Into this already uncertain picture comes another remarkable development.

The Arts Council of Northern Ireland itself has now published an assessment outlining what it believes is required simply to stabilise the sector after more than a decade of erosion. Its analysis suggests that restoring baseline sustainability would require an opening investment of £21.27 million for 2026–27, almost double the current baseline allocation.

This is not a casual observation.

Arm’s length bodies do not normally publish such stark assessments of their own funding position. Yet here the Arts Council is effectively acknowledging what organisations and artists have been saying for years: that the system has been operating under sustained pressure since at least 2010, and that without intervention the likely consequences are fewer jobs, reduced programming and diminished reach across communities.

In other words, the infrastructure of the sector is already under massive strain.

And yet the organisations expected to support cultural life across Northern Ireland continue to operate in a policy vacuum.

As I have said before as well, every publicly funded arts organisation here is governed by volunteer trustees carrying legal responsibilities for the charities they oversee. Those trustees are expected to ensure their organisations operate responsibly and manage risk appropriately. In return, they might expect some policy guidance as to how government intends to support them and their cherished creative missions on behalf of their participants, their audinces, their people. 

And while all this inertia and vacuum sucks the air from our lungs, another suggestion has begun circulating.

Some have argued that what artists here really need here is a Northern Ireland version of the Basic Income for Artists scheme currently operating in the Republic. It is an appealing idea. Who would object to giving artists greater financial security (apart from a long and continuing line of civil servants and ministers in NI of course)?

But the comparison is worth noting.

The Republic did not introduce that scheme in isolation. The pilot emerged after years of sustained public investment in the arts, with overall state funding to their Arts Council alone now reaching roughly €140 million annually. The basic income programme itself was introduced within that strengthened ecosystem and has since been made permanent following a really positive evaluation of how it has enabled artists to engage better with that infrastructure. 

In other words, the weekly payments to a couple of thousand artists are not the foundation of Irish arts policy. They are the result of it.

Here in Northern Ireland the situation is rather different. Our funding base has been eroded for more than a decade. Organisations operate with some of the lowest levels of public investment across these islands. The Arts Council itself is now warning that the existing system requires significant uplift simply to remain viable.

Against that backdrop, proposing a basic income scheme here begins to sound less like a policy intervention and more like a policy shortcut. You can't build a roof before laying the foundations. And how many could it actually help? If you developed a comparable scheme, based on a pro-rated per capita basis, you'd have to support about 700 artists, with about £15k a year. That alone would totally eclipse the Arts Council's annual budget here. So, I'm not sure that its even feasible to talk about because at present , with the very foundations of the arts here increasingly uncertain. 

Just to remind you:

• no settled government arts policy, 
• no political delivery strategy, 
• and a sector already operating under sustained financial pressure with another major conflict that threatens to deepen the cost of living crisis, that seems to herald austerity as an ever-present. 

And yet, despite everything, the great work continues.

Artists still create. Organisations still deliver programmes. Communities still participate.

The high-wire act continues, as the fortunes of all sway uneasily. 

But, if you value the arts at all, please recognise that this sector's resilience should not be mistaken for consent. And patience should not be mistaken for meek compliance. Our work is our livelihood. Our work matters to other lives too. 

And after all these years of uncertainty, the sector has just got used to being demoralised, threatened, undermined, ignored and left behind. As our MLAs enjoy a payrise of £14,000 per year, representing £2,000 more than the mean earnings of artists in the North only a few years ago, our political class sit on their hands when it comes to assisting the arts. And soon, as they ratchet up the hyperbole of electioneering, they will be telling us just how important we all are as artists. 

Sigh...

We don't expect much at this point however. 

Just the basics.

A policy that exists.     A strategy that explains how it works.

And a government that understands the difference.                     That would be a start. 

The Arts Matter. 

Creating a Change Part 4: Active Ownership - Making it Ours

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.