Community Involvement

Droichead Arts Centre engages with community groups and organisations through our education programme in a variety of different contexts. We aim to develop sustainable relationships and partnerships with other organisations and agencies to deliver quality collaborative arts practice for all involved.

Past Projects

Projects 2009

With the support of Louth Leader Partnership, Drogheda and the Arts Councils Artist in Residency Scheme Animator Maeve Clancy came to work with us for a series of month in Summer 2009.  During this period Maeve worked with The Child and Family Centre, Drogheda Youth Development and Louth VEC Adult Literacy Service. This is a short synopsis of the work they accomplished during their programmes;

Shadow pictures
Scenes created by the two YPG groups during workshops about storytelling, character creation and building up backgrounds. Cut paper behind a screen, photographed and printed out on tracing paper.

Box of Creatures
Some of the original cut paper characters and background elements were composed together in a giant lightbox to create a scene which reflects the amazing creativity of the YPG.

Mysterious Neverland with Drogheda Youth Development
Mysterious Neverland

Drawda Stories
Artist Maeve Clancy worked with the Adult Literacy Group from Drogheda VEC in devising, writing and illustrating into comic format, their stories about coming back to education.
Click here to link to the stories.

This short story was written and drawn by Maeve Clancy during her residency with the YPG at the Child and Family Centre in Drogheda.  A comic/graphic tale about space and being on the outside.

Projects 2008

Leanbh Arts festival for Children 2008

In The Newspaper
It’s like their voices were finally being heard and they had a lot to say about everything, which was one of the main goals of the paper. Crossing the frontiers of the subjective nature of news reporting, the Kidz Times, a community newspaper created by students from Marymount National School, Ballsgrove and Congress Avenue NS was another conduit for children’s ideas, which reveal astute observations of life in Drogheda.  

The 12 page supplement was produced by 60 school pupils (aged 9 and 10 years), facilitated by the Arts Centre in collaboration with The Drogheda Independent newspaper. 12,000 copies were delivered to households throughout Drogheda as part of the Drogheda Independent paper distribution during the week of the festival. The Drogheda Independent has a turn over of 12,000 newspapers per week. The supplement was also available to all visitors at public buildings and coffee shops throughout the town.

On The Radio                                                           
In conjunction with LMFM, a number of interactive sound pieces were developed. The audio works featured the comedic news stories of children’s views of various real life news stories could be heard each weekday on LMFM as part of the Daire Nelson Magazine Talk Show and downloaded as podcasts from www.droichead.com. These news podcasts created an individual soundscape for Drogheda featuring stories as individual as the children who made them.

For both strands of the project Droichead employed an artist, journalist, photographer and producer to work with the schools for four months leading up to the festival.

Please click on the links below to listen to the Leanbh 2008 children's recordings: -

Kidscast
Spooky Story
Spooky Story 2
Spooky Story 3
Evil Mr. Murphy
South Afican Schools
FIFA 09 on the Wii
Bullying

Kidz Times Newspaper

Click here to view the Kidz Times Newspaper