14 - Community arts

Summary

‘Arts approaches can open a door for people such that, once they go through it, you know they’re on a pathway which they can continue on. It's very, very transformative in a way that other things might not be. And it's kind of on the community's level. It's nonjudgemental. So, you can go at your own pace and it's non-elitist, but it's just so valuable I think, because you’re creating community through the activities that you’re doing anyway because you’re bringing all these people together.’ (Belona Greenwood, 2022, Focus Group)

Introduction

The opening quotation expresses some of the potential of community arts. How often do we come across colleagues who have personal skills and talents which accentuate their ability to practise as community workers? From our perspective, these talents are often woven into practice. We are not only the community worker, but often also a musician, a storyteller, a photographer, an artist, a dancer, a reader. How often do we find colleagues where the delineation between personal and professional activities in our own communities is blurred? We areall residents of a community somewhere. We would argue that we are all participants at some point in our daily lives in the arts. This allows for increased perception and understanding of issues for us as workers, while it can clearly also require us to be vigilant in any misunderstanding of our aligned roles.

The communities and individuals with whom we work are diverse, with multifaceted strengths and challenges. Community workers bring a range of acquired specialist skills and knowledge to their operational work and, when working in partnership with artists, we can call on a wide variety of approaches to strengthen our capacity to deliver successful programmes. Indeed, to build vibrant, resilient, responsive, healthy and well-anchored communities, we must use every tool in our toolbox. In this chapter we will explore what value and results can be brought about through creative and arts-focused interventions.

Community arts in context

The term ‘community arts’ is often used in a generic way to signify arts or cultural practice undertaken with and by communities and which uses a range of media and artistic practices (Meade and Shaw, 2021).