Culture, Arts and Refugees

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Noel Bridgeman, Paragon Ensemble

Location Visited

Scotland

What did you do?

My study visit consisted of interviewing and learning about three organisations who work in the field of arts and refugees in Glasgow. All the interviews took place in March 2008 over two days in and around mid Scotland.

I was keen to find out what experiences these companies had with involving refugees and asylum seekers in their programmes and whether they had encountered significant barriers or difficulties and what solutions they considered had worked. Also, understanding the companies better and learning about each organisation’s structures and arts programming.

Contacts

What did you learn from your study visit?

1. How each organisation measures the impact of their work and what methods they use to evaluate their work – in most cases there was quantitative information on a number of groups, participants, audience figures, number of performances, venues visited and qualitative information gathered from surveys and questionnaires.

2. All the organisations have worked consistently with arts and refugees over the past five years and believe in including refugees and asylum seekers in their programme free of charge – inviting their contributions in a welcoming and creative manner. There was common agreement about the value and purpose of the work that each company does, to use their specific art-forms as the medium to engage people of all ages and abilities in group creativity.

What key issues or questions did it raise for you?

The need for increased communication between the organisations. Could Paragon play a leading role in bringing the companies together as a core group of a Scottish regional network?

Since the report two of the organisations, ConFAB and Street Level gave a commitment to promoting the network as Inter Cultural Arts Network ICAN. Other groups who attended the Paragon conference in November 2007 will also join the network.

In what ways has this experience changed or enriched you professionally?

It has increased my confidence in the capacity of artists and organisations to be able to effectively work together to profile our / their own field of work in a way that is legible to external agencies and stakeholders.

It has also strengthened my resolve to continue working towards establishing a managerial layer in the community arts field in Scotland that helps us to effectively monitor and classify our work.