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New Belfast Community Arts Initiative

Searching for something can be a difficult process. Looking for something hidden for so long can be an impossible task. When the things that you’re seeking involve trust, confidence and mutual respect, the challenge can be even greater. But, if you approach the search creatively, sensitively and methodically, you stand a better chance of success. Using the arts can provide fun, innovative and challenging ways for all of us to explore our own lives and find or even re-discover, what makes us unique.

Community art is a process of harnessing the transformative power of original artistic expression and producing a range of outcomes: social, cultural and environmental. Looked at politically, socially, culturally and/or economically, community arts aim to establish and maximise inclusive ways of working, providing an opportunity for communities and their participants to continue to find ways to develop their own skills as artists and for artists to explore ways of transferring those skills. Through this process, community arts aim to maximise the access, participation, authorship and ownership in collective arts practice.

Belfast is an old historic city, so why New Belfast?

We support the transformation that we insist is happening in the city. Any recent visitor to Belfast can see that physical change. New shops and offices are springing up and for many, a new sense of prosperity may be emerging, but there are still worryingly high levels of deprivation in the city and many who are marginalised by circumstance – where they come from, how they look, what they believe in, what they can or can’t do.

Here at New Belfast Community Arts Initiative, we strive to offer, communities and individuals, real opportunities for growth and renewal through the arts using film, photography, fashion, sculpture, visual art, poetry, creative writing, multimedia, carnival arts, dance, drama, music, mural making, whatever!

Mission, Vision, Values

New Belfast’s Mission is:

Supporting community through the arts

We aim to achieve this through:

  • Nurturing creativity
  • Supporting learning
  • Promoting inclusiveness
  • Targeting social and economic need
  • Challenging sectarianism and racism

Our Vision is:

An artistically vibrant society

The Values that New Belfast works to are:

Trust, integrity and a shared humanity

New Belfast is dedicated to the development and provision of a core programme of inspiring art workshops.

These workshops bring together organisations, individuals and communities on arts projects which:

  • are rooted in the local community and are responsive to local needs and interests
  • develop and empower individuals and communities
  • contribute to social cohesion by providing a platform for dialogue through new ways of seeing and doing, leading to the awareness of a shared humanity
  • have a city-wide dimension
  • promote participation in the arts to individuals and groups of different abilities, background, age, gender and sexual orientation (Section 75 groups)
  • are focused on some of the most badly affected and socially disadvantaged communities in Belfast and beyond, contributing to the social, economic and cultural regeneration of our society
  • promote the role of local artists in the community as contributors to personal and community self-esteem and empowerment
  • provide artists with employment and development opportunities

With over 2,500 participants taking part in projects every year, we work in communities throughout the city; north, south, east and west, delivering arts projects to a large number community groups and schools.
We are committed to the promotion of best practice, raising the profile of community arts in Belfast and celebrating the innate talent within our historic city, providing a means for citizens at the margins to express their lives and concerns to the wider city, offering a living social dialogue to inform and renew Belfast.
New Belfast is always striving to enhance its ability to offer creative opportunities. Over the last years, New Belfast has grown from strength to strength. The key to maintaining the impact of this work is momentum. If we are to build meaningfully from one programme to the next, we require continued support, from communities, from funders and from artists.

Conor Shields, Programme Director