Digital Media in Councils and Community »
CuriousWorks has all sorts of innovative ideas for building creative capacity in your team and your community. We’ve worked with councils, organisations and their communities in the suburbs, the city, the country and the desert. We understand the essential role local government and non-profits play across the country, but also that each LGA and community has unique needs that require a tailored, localised response.
We offer a diverse range of services, including:
- Fun, engaging arts and digital media workshops for your community – for all levels of talent, experience and background
- A creative media training program that is focused on leaving long-term digital media skills in your team and in your community
- Creative community projects with innovative arts outcomes
- Consultation around digital media strategy and communications
Contact Elias, our Head Educator, to discuss your project further: elias@curiousworks.com.au or (02) 9281 2570.
Case Study: Neighbourhood Stories in St Marys with Penrith City Council
CuriousWorks trained up a diverse group of local citizens to make media on equipment that was already available: old cameras, mobile phones, the computers at the library. This inter-cultural and inter-generational group then made short, compelling media pieces (text, images, sound and video) about different parts of Penrith and its people. All content was uploaded to an online map of Penrith.
The pieces were placed alongside research done by the council to build its Neighbourhood Action Plan; thus the content made by the participants played a key role in gathering information for the council and affecting the future development of the community. Penrith City Council recently won a prestigious local government cultural award for this project.
Learn more here: http://curiousworks.com.au/projects/neighbourhood-stories/
Case Study: Newman, remote Western Australia
Weeks before starting a long-term project in Newman, the designated base of operations, Newman Youth Centre, closed down. CuriousWorks had to shift its focus. We worked with young people in various community spaces, homes and even on the streets, helping them make media about their town. They made some great stories and were trained in how to use new media to lobby for their youth centre to be re-opened. They campaigned to council and were successful, with the youth centre re-opening in early 2011.
Meanwhile, we built capacity in all the schools in town to carry on the benefits of the project, to ensure sustainability. Media labs have now been set up in all the schools, as well as an after-school lab at the youth centre. Professional development was done with the most engaged young people we met, as well as the school teachers and youth worker. The town now has the capacity to tell compelling local stories in film and photography and share them through an annual local film festival.
Alongside all this, we worked with small Indigenous communities based around the mining town. In partnership with a burgeoning media outfit, we built a crew of professional Indigenous media makers who can make content suitable for the general public about their way of life. Their work is also showed at the local film festival and schools, slowly building empathy and a sense of inclusion between the very different cultural groups in that region.
Learn more here: http://curiousworks.com.au/projects/newman-stories/
Feedback from Penrith City Council:
Neighbourhood Stories from my perspective has been about using technology as a vehicle for empowering residents in a local neighbourhood, in this case St Marys, which has been identified as a disadvantaged neighbourhood by the Australia Bureau of Statistics.
There is a real difference when you are collecting information from residents or from communities when members from that community are actually doing the interviewing. The type of material that comes out of this process is a lot richer and a lot more truthful.
The ripple effect of this project is huge – it allows new creative solutions for individuals and communities … it taps into their creativity, gives them a voice where they didn’t have a voice before. But most importantly it is not confined to the arts in an arts sense but also opens up a whole new series of creative solutions to everyone involved.
Cali Vandyk-Dunlevy, Cultural Development Officer, Penrith City Council