About us

Create Strategy 2020 – 2025

Resources

Read Connect Create Change
Watch launch highlights video
Senator Colette Kelleher Speech
Deirdre Figueiredo, MBE Speech

Connect Create Change: Leading Collaborative Arts in Ireland

Create is the national development agency for collaborative arts with over 30 years’ experience of leading this practice in Ireland. Our work initiates cross-sectoral national and international partnerships which support artists and communities to co-create work of depth, ambition and excellence.

Create publishes this strategy at a time of significant global change and in the firm belief that by working together, artists and communities can purposefully explore how collaborative arts engage in distinct, relevant and powerful ways with the urgent social, cultural and political issues of our times.

This strategy provides a framework to support the ecology, resources and relationships that will develop discourse, policy and next practice. Our five strategic goals are designed to increase the reach of collaborative arts, enhance its value and ensure its ongoing sustainability. Our actions will create key focal points for the sector.

Our Strategy recognises the need for an approach to diversity that is intersectional, acknowledging how multiple forms of discrimination (e.g. gender, class, ethnicity, age) can combine and overlap in the experiences of individuals and minority groups. Create fully subscribes to the principles of Equality, Human Rights and Diversity as outlined in the Arts Council’s EHD policy (2019). We are currently developing an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy with external equality experts Hassan Mahamdallie (UK) and Francesca La Morgia (Irl), which will be published in spring of 2022.

Connect Create Change was launched on the 26th September 2019, following Create’s Networking Day. It was launched by Independent Senator Colette Kelleher, with contributions from Deirdre Figueiredo, MBE, Chair of the Create board, Ailbhe Murphy, Director, and world-renowned socially engaged artist Tania Bruguera.

On this page you will find links to read Connect Create Change: Leading Collaborative Arts in Ireland, as well as speeches by Senator Kelleher and Deirdre Figueiredo. You will also find a video featuring highlights from the launch.