New Web Resources from Creative Exchange

New Web Resources on Culture and HIV/AIDS, Conflict, International Development and Refugees.

Creative Exchange is launching four new microsites on the relationship between Culture and these four key themes. These sites bring together in one place work from our international research and our international and UK based networking projects. They include research papers, resources and case studies.

HIV/AIDS: The Creative Challenge
Engaging culture and creativity in HIV/AIDS prevention

HIV/AIDS - The Creative Challenge aimed to make HIV/AIDS strategies more effective by enabling policymakers, development practitioners and NGOs internationally to develop new and more sensitive methods of working with local cultures. It been developed with the support of Healthlink, the UNESCO/UNAIDS joint programme on A Cultural Approach to HIV/AIDS Prevention and Care and more recently the UK Department for International Development (DFID).

The project built dialogue and knowledge exchange between policymakers, practitioners and civil society in four locations: Vietnam/Cambodia, Kenya, South Africa and the Caribbean.

We found that a cultural approach plays an important role in enabling HIV/AIDS projects to be culturally sensitive and address their local context in effective and appropriate ways. They supported advocacy and communications and helped prevent stigma and discrimination. More resources are needed for training and organizational development, evaluation and monitoring if culture is to become part of the strategy to combat HIV/AIDS.

Creative Exchange has proposed national Cultural Consortia to fund local coalitions of cultural experts and activists working to prevent HIV/AIDS, support training and organizational development, and to invest in long-term programmes of research and evaluation of this work.

The microsite also features 22 case studies on culture and HIV/AIDS from the project regions.

http://www.creativexchange.org/hivaids

Culture and Conflict Transformation In Burundi

In 2007 Creative Exchange brought together Community Based Organisations working with cultural approaches to conflict transformation in Burundi to explore how their work contributed to peacebuilding. The research found that culture enables communities to explore values, develop unity, validate minorities, and build communication.

The full report of the first phase and an analysis paper by Judy El Bushra exploring the relationship between culture and conflict can be found here .

The website includes case studies on: Intashikirwa - Club du Lac des Oiseaux (The 'Lake of Birds' Association), Umuco - Rainbow, Tubiyage, Dushirehamwe and SWAA (Society of Women and AIDS in Africa) Burundi.

http://www.creativexchange.org/cct

Culture and Development

This microsite brings together all Creative Exchange's recent work on the relationship between culture and international development, which stemmed from its project Routemapping Culture and Development.

The site includes information on using the Levels Model to analyse the relationship between culture and development, and includes a group of 7 case studies:

Adugna Community Dance Theatre and GemTV (Comic Relief)
Global Dialogues - Scenarios videos (Comic Relief)
Stepping Stones (Actionaid)
Urunana (Health Unlimited)
Eye to Eye project (Save the Children UK)
Buddhist monks in the fight against AIDS (Save the Children UK)
PILLARS (Tearfund)

http://www.creativexchange.org/chd

Culture and Refugees

The updated version of this microsite includes a section with material from Creative Exchange’s A Sense of Belonging report of 2005, and a new section with resources and relevant material from the recently finished Peer Leadership Network on Culture, Arts and Refugees network (PLN). The PLN was a one year learning and sharing programme that brought together sixteen cultural practitioners and managers working in the sector, with the aim to increase knowledge and explore issues of sustainability for cultural programmes for and with Refugees and Asylum Seekers.

The new PLN section includes profiles of all network participants, individual reports and experiences of their study visits to UK and overseas organisations, workshops and meeting materials, as well as key issues affecting the sustainability of Refugee Arts (ethics of the work, monitoring and impact of projects and funding, fundraising and communications).

Participating organisations were:

• Cardboard Citizens, London
• Exiled Writers Ink!, London
• Greenwich and Lewisham Young People’s Theatre (GLYPT), London
• Oval House, London
• Paragon Ensemble, Glasgow,
• Photovoice, London,
• Small World Theatre, Cardigan, Wales, and
• Sound It Out, Birmingham.

The site also has a private archive of materials gathered throughout the project accessible for PLN participants and others interested in this topic.

http://cultureartsrefugees.creativexchange.org/car