Culture, Arts and Refugees
Cathy Weatherald
 | Cathy WeatheraldProject Manager, Cardboard Citizens |
Biography
Cathy Weatherald came to the Creative Exchange PLN network from a background in Arts Management in the Social Sector, with a primary focus on work with homeless people and homeless issues. Following the completion of her degree in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex, she did a stint with the Big Issue in Brighton, alongside working for a Carnival Arts organisation called Carnival Collective. Following this, armed with her interest in arts in community settings, she made the move to London to start work for Cardboard Citizens, the UK’s foremost proponent of Forum theatre and an active voice for the representation of homeless and displaced people.
With Cardboard Citizens, Cathy has helped to produce a series of workshop and performance projects for homeless people and refugees/asylum seekers. In this role, alongside project management, she has been a key figure in establishing relationships with participants, offering the PEARL assessment (a method currently used in the Social Sector for the assessment and monitoring of participants’ developmental progress), delivering Advice and Guidance, and maintaining communication lines between the various branches of project implementation – focusing on the creative task of connecting the artistic, administrative, and service-delivery sections of the organisation.
PLN Experience
Cathy’s Study Visit to freeDimensional in Cairo for PLNproved to be the most important opportunity that the PLN could have given her, both in terms of how it helped her to understand the purpose of the Network, and also how it inspired her personally and professionally in the work that she does. She was particularly interested in finding out more about provisions for refugee arts internationally and in forging links between the networks visited and Cardboard Citizens on a knowledge-sharing basis.
FreeDimensional is a New York–based organisation, currently resident at Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, which has a similar vision to Creative Exchange. Both organisations facilitate networks linking artistic communities, creative individuals and social justice movements internationally. freeDimensional’s guiding principle is that the existence of community arts space creates the possibility of using that space to conduct programming and advocacy work with and for exiled artists and culture workers. In this vein, it provides community arts spaces with toolkits for capacity building, awareness-raising, networking and, especially important to fD, empowering the outreach strand of an organisation or research centre.
The experience of the PLN showed Cathy the power of networks to facilitate creative initiatives and the meeting of minds to grapple with the very pertinent question of how multicultural societies can be a force for positive change, not conflict.
Study Visit Report
Click here to read Cathy’s Study Visit Report