August 2008 marked the end of CAF’s two and a half year Active Citizenship programme. The Peace II funded project used arts to tackle conflict related issues.
The programme began in January 2006 and was made up of three strands:
• ARTiculate: a 20 hour programme of arts activities based in community organisations.
• A Woman’s Part: a creative writing and drama programme which explored the role of women as activists during the conflict
• A seminar programme which considered a wide range of topics and brought together policy makers and community arts activists.
Articulate
The ARTiculate programme worked with 16 groups across Northern Ireland offering 160 participants the opportunity to take part in arts projects exploring conflict related issues.
Groups explored issues such as immigration, the complexity of shared space and the legacy of murders committed during the conflict using creative writing, visual art, drama, multimedia and film.
The diverse range of participant groups included young people, community groups and victim/survivor groups.
Each group chose the artform they felt was most appropriate and worked with CAF to identify a facilitator and plan their project.
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A Woman’s Part
This ambitious project used drama and creative writing to engage with women who had been activists during the Northern Ireland conflict. Participants included trade union representatives, ex-combatants, former members of the security forces and human rights and community activists.
The programme culminated in a publication featuring the participants' prose and poetry (available to download for free from the CAF website or in hard copy on request). Short scenes from this publication were performed at a number of public events.
This project was the most challenging element of the Active Citizenship programme due in part to the personal nature of the subject matter. The workshop sessions raised issues for many of the participants and a strong recommendation was that counselling services should be attached to any project which involves such deep levels of engagement with participants.
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Seminar programme
CAF organised 41 seminars across the region allowing over 867 people to discuss a varied range of subjects including community arts as a tool to address racism, parading in a divided city, the development of Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter and issues facing rural community arts practitioners.
Thanks to a partnership with community television and media organisation Northern Visions (NvTv), five of these discussion sessions were recorded and aired and can be viewed online at www.caf.ie/seminars.asp
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The next step
One of the key aims of the Active Citizenship programme was to develop case studies, evaluations and models of good practice. These, together with the evaluation from the programme and a learning resource from the Woman’s Part project will be made available via the CAF website shortly.
The programme provided clear evidence that ‘peace comes dripping slow’ and the arts can be a useful intervention, creating much needed space for dialogue, but cannot exist in isolation and need clear support structures to act as an effective peace building tool. As such CAF believes it is essential that arts are included within the incoming Peace III programme and will continue to advocate for arts to be a part of the ongoing community development essential to redefining a post conflict society.
The programme has also shown that there is a clear need for in-depth research to track and demonstrate the impact of arts programmes in a community context. CAF plans to begin a research programme in 2009 with a view to producing a resource similar to the Vital Signs publication produced in 1998.
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