Sara Walmsley, socially-engaged artist and researcher, Conor Shields, long-term community arts director, practitioner and advocate, and Mairéad Duffy, musician and community practitioner, have volunteered to search together for new approaches to advocate for the transformative power of the arts—particularly in terms of influencing policy in Northern Ireland and the Republic. Having ‘bumped into each other ’along the way, we realise that we share this determination and are acting as an informal group to explore how we can learn together to better influence new opportunities for others.

Our motivation is simple but urgent and we need your help and expertise: to explore and hopefully find and build new alliances across practice and academia, and to imagine fresh policy formations, at a time when years of traditional advocacy and siloed government approaches have left community-facing arts practice in a perilous position—especially in Northern Ireland, where no current arts policy exists (only a recently published “framework”) after years of a downward spiral of governmental resources and support.

We are interested in:

• how we think differently about the role of the arts,

• how arts can be applied in different contexts, in engaging communities,

• and in particular how young people might be inspired and supported to see creativity not only as self-expression, but as a viable pathway into work, collaboration, shared and personal development and new, more meaningful contributions to our society.

This is an open invitation to academics, practitioners, and cultural workers, to join this conversation. Whether your work lies in social psychology, education, cultural policy, health and wellbeing, digital creativity, or simply in championing the value of the arts, we believe this moment calls for shared thinking, new partnerships, and a fresh, cross-disciplinary effort to reshape the future of cultural participation.

Reimagining Arts Advocacy:

World Café Event: Interdisciplinary Approaches for a Sustainable Future

An All Island Conversation

11am-3pm, 10th October, Centre for Creative Ethnography, Irish Studies Seminar Room, 01/003 27 University Square, QUB, Belfast

RSVP by 7/10/25 : Reimagine_advocacy@capartscentre.com