Creative New Zealand's new community arts policy

More support for community arts

Nā tēnā rau, nā tēnā rau, tipu ora ai te rākau.
Each leaf contributes to the wellbeing of the tree.

Creative New Zealand has developed a new community arts policy which will result in more funding and resources being made available to help communities participate in the arts, including a $360,000 boost to the Creative Communities Scheme.

The new policy results from a review of community arts.  Creative New Zealand is grateful to all those who completed our online questionnaire earlier in the year; this helped us define what we mean by community arts.

What do we mean by “community arts”?

Creative New Zealand has identified three principal strands of community arts activities. These are not mutually exclusive as elements of each can sometimes be in a single community arts project:    

Community cultural development
This involves arts practitioners working with communities and community groups to help them:

• achieve artistic and social outcomes
• explore and express issues and interests through the arts (eg. environmental and social equity issues)

Maintenance and transmission of cultural traditions
This involves maintaining and passing on from one generation to the next:

• Māori and Pasifika heritage artforms
• the distinctive artistic and cultural traditions of defined groups of interest (eg. migrant communities)

Leisure and recreation activities
This includes community groups devoted to recreational art activities (eg. pipe bands, repertory societies, arts crafts and jewellery groups).

How are community arts activities funded?

Creative New Zealand funds community arts activities through:

the Creative Communities Scheme (CCS) which is administered by your local city or district council.   The Arts Council has injected a further $360,000 into the Creative Communities Scheme, effectively raising its budget by 12.9% from $2,789,500 in 2010/2011to $3,149,500 in 2011/12.
 

Quick Response and Arts Grants from Creative New Zealand.  These will support community arts activities which focus on the maintenance and transmission of cultural traditions and community cultural development.  More information on Quick Response and Arts Grants will be published in our Funding and Programmes Guide 2012, which is due to be published in December.

Online resources

Creative New Zealand is developing an online resource to support community arts and will contact you again when these go live.

In meantime if you have profiles and photographs of funded community arts projects we would welcome your contribution to the Funded Artists and Their Work section of the Creative New Zealand website.  Follow the steps to sign up, and showcase your projects.

You can also illustrate and share stories of community arts success on the Creative New Zealand flickr page.  Please email photos to Natalie Petricevich

For further information please contact Calvin Scott, Adviser, Policy Development.

Thank you