Supporting arts and enterprise skills in communities through creative engagement with the local area

The project proposes a framework and methodology of artistic and creative social intervention that empowers and supports engagement with communities of young people affected by change in their local environment.
This is a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Knowledge Transfer Fellowship aimed at building new and innovative models of creative community engagement and collaboration. The project supports active citizenship among young people by facilitating social capacity building through enterprise structures and transferring the creative lead in socially responsive arts projects to those in need of empowerment. The initial action research project is utilising an arts and enterprise participation model to create self-branded commodities that will give a role to young people within a wider, community driven, gun crime reduction and social cohesion programme. The model seeks to sustain the commitment of those participating by focussing on metrics and benchmarks that young people in the project can own and influence. The blend of creative agendas and enterprise goals provides a breadth of purpose and opportunity, linking outputs to specific environmental and social impacts. The project evidences the role and function of arts media in multi-strand learning and participation projects. The approach is evolving through experiential processes and action based learning for transferable life skills; mostly centred on School and other formal educational settings the project provides a methodology emphatic of team and collaborative process, individual responsibility and creativity. The process develops ownership and shared responsibility in relation to community initiatives; fostering fresh creativity and a diversity of approach in the exploration of social, environmental and change related issues arising from economic disadvantage. The transfer process is targeting a toolkit relating to multi-agency project working, creative research, enterprise simulation and applied social arts practices.