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| Leaf Arts |
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| community & public arts |
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| www.leaf-arts.co.uk |
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| Leaf Arts provides creative arts opportunities to empower, assist and facilitate people in making positive changes within their lives and community. |
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| Youth Arts |
| Since the early 1980’s the creative arts has primarily been used within an urban regeneration context when working with young people outside the formal education environment. The focus has always been to use the power of the arts to meet neighbourhood regeneration performance indicators such as health education, raise employment opportunities, return young people to mainstream education and in particular reduce crime (anti social behaviour). Along with these objectives there has been research that evidences the role the creative arts has in increasing social capital, establishing positive networks for young people and building trust and cooperation to enable work to deal with other issues to take place. All very worthwhile causes aimed at improving lives and communities. |
| When working with children and young people during, formative and impressionable years, it is crucial for those responsible for delivering projects to recognise the role the arts play in personal development, cognitive and psychomotor development, critical and creative thinking, development of emotional intelligence, communication and social skills amongst others, and for these benefits to have equal importance alongside the regeneration performance indicators as reasons for engagement. The issue of ‘intention’, of putting young people first and foremost, before the measureable issues that are being addressed, will help give young people a better start in life and establish the creative arts as a fundamental activity within their lives, rather than it being used as a problem solving fixative – an approach I think not missed by the young people! |
| The difficulty for the community artists working in this field is not that their approach to the creative arts is one that focuses on problem fixing rather than the individual, but that this approach is reinforced in the way the arts is attached to funding criteria and hence how art projects are packaged and targeted. A critical change of focus (or intention) could be achieved if the evidence base for the creative arts' efficacy were established. This would no doubt show that all the performance indicators linked with regeneration would still be met while enabling a shift in attitude towards how and why young people are encouraged to be involved in the creative arts. Truly inspiring achievements by young people have repeatedly shown the ability of the creative arts to act as a catalyst for turning their lives around. However, these results occur despite the arts being there as a problem fixer, rather than as a fundamental part of our lives because we believe the arts supports and develop our uniquely creative human condition. |
| Undertaking research to collect the required data that might support this idea is, as always with the arts, difficult to quantify and is something that many academic bodies have been addressing for many years. This research has thrown up convincing arguments (if not with full scientific rigour) that the creative arts support young people who struggle with socialising and creating supportive social networks, develops understanding across cultural borders, opens up self-imposed boundaries whether geographical or intellectual, inspires wider economic horizons and improves educational achievements at school, amongst many other benefits. |
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