AccessArt is a deeply personal organisation. I created it through personal need, with a friend I had studied with at the Royal College of Art. When we left the Royal College, we had the skills and expertise, but our connection to the subject and our sense of purpose were a little lost. We realised we needed to reconnect, and our solution was to go back to our roots and to why we wanted to make in the first place, as children.
What followed became AccessArt. We worked in schools, museums and galleries, sharing our passion for making with children, teenagers and adults. We shared our experiences on a (very small) website and encouraged other artist educators to share their projects too. Resource by resource, AccessArt evolved, and through our evolution we better defined our working philosophy. As our understanding of how to teach art grew, so did our confidence, and we began to pass on our knowledge and skills to teachers and advocate for the subject, becoming a Subject Association for art.
Despite that incredible growth, of which we are so proud, AccessArt remains a deeply personal organisation, not just to me now, but also, I think, to the team and trustees. Every day, we ask ourselves: Are we staying true to our values? Are we responding to what people need? Are we helping others find their own creative confidence?
At a time when the world around us feels as uncertain and changeable as ever, our core strength is vital. As CEO, it’s important to me that we are kind, that we enable, that we support and that we inspire. To achieve these things in such a changeable environment requires clarity of purpose, understanding of our audience, and vision for what might be.
Our core values have always guided everything we do. This year we have revisited those values to better define what makes AccessArt unique, and to be as transparent as possible about what drives us and why we care.
Thanks to our members, we are financially self-sustaining, giving us the stability and independence to put these values at the heart of our decisions, resources and advocacy. They shape how we work together and support teachers, schools, artist educators, cultural organisations and learners of all ages. They also express our belief in how creativity can best be nurtured through art, craft and design.
We will be launching the AccessArt Manifesto for Making very soon so that you can find your own ways of putting these values into action, in your setting. In the meantime, we hope our values resonate with you.
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