AccessArt Studio Project: The importance of community
Key to the concept behind AccessArt Studio Project, is the importance of creating and being sustained by community.
The AccessArt Studio Project project will embrace a wide range of partners and audiences, including schools, community groups, local authorities, individual makers, cultural organisations, national agencies and business and industry. Vitally, the project centres around the idea that everyone has the potential to both give to, and benefit from, the project. AccessArt’s role in enabling this exchange, and to nurture and sustain the project through enabling sharing and collaboration, will be crucial.
For the project to work, individuals and groups must feel that they benefit from taking part and the project must present individuals with opportunities which they might not otherwise have. These opportunities might be in the form of exposure to a new audience, work opportunities, or learning opportunities.
These personal benefits can be balanced however by community benefits. Partners and learners would be encouraged to think about all events in a more symbiotic way. That it to say, a school benefiting from a workshop would be encouraged to then give something back out to the community (maybe pass on their newly learnt skills to another group of teachers, or send their experience via text and image to the AccessArt website for others to be inspired and enabled by). Or an individual maker, after having provided a class to a studio group and being paid for that class, might then share their experiences/feedback to other maker/facilitators in the community. Or a studio that has found a way of creating income for their studio would share that knowledge. Businesses and cultural organisations would be included in this exchange.
AccessArt could act as a “distributor” of resources to studios. For instance local businesses, cultural organisations and makers, and the studios themselves, could make “offers” to the wider community. These might consist of offers of skill share, resources, materials or teaching. These “offers” could be promoted through the AccessArt studio website back to the other studios. Crucially these offers will not be advertisement for paid services – the offers would be made free of charge in the spirit of the community, or in exchange for other services, resources or materials etc. These offers will be in addition to the paid work opportunities the project should create.
See Also:
AccessArt Studio Project – Summary
Benefits to schools, museums, galleries, community groups and cultural organisations
Benefits to individual makers/artists/workshop facilitators
