Building Community – Art for Social Action is a project focusing on building the capacity of grassroots CSOs, activists, artists, and ‘local authorities’ to promote positive social actions through the arts. The project creates an opportunity to merge, advance and facilitate the consortium’s expertise and connect their networks to create and strengthen community. The action clusters creative collective spaces for learning and implementation that promote innovative solutions for political-cultural-confidence building mediation. Visual art can be a vessel of universally meaningful messages and profound concepts that can be widely shared to large audiences. The current situation in Cyprus, specifically within the CSO sector, requires intervention. Research and experience have revealed that most CSOs are not active in intercommunal activities, and there is no mechanism to recognize civil society as a legitimate stakeholder in social dialogue. Project partners also identified two key areas for CSO capacity building: advocacy and communications.
The project aims to generate a positive and far-reaching impact by building stakeholder capacity, fostering community connections, nurturing dialogue and understanding, engaging audiences through art, intervening in the CSO sector, and enhancing advocacy and communications skills. These collaborative initiatives seek to establish a thriving and welcoming society where art serves as a catalyst for social change and where civil society actively contributes to Cyprus's future.
Art for Social Action grants aim to build stronger connections between the civil society and creative/ cultural sectors from across the divide in Cyprus through opportunities to pair artists with the CSOs, independent groups and activists who participated in the Arts for Social Action Workshops and provide them with a platform to showcase their innovative project ideas that address pressing social and environmental issues, and more generally that promote positive change.
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Photo credit @Nikolas Karatzas
