KEYNOTE ADDRESS - JUDE KELLY, CBE

CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS

The Arts Council in partnership with the MA Festive Arts (University of Limerick) presented Change Makers conference on the 14th of February 2020, the first national gathering of festival makers and festival stakeholders in Ireland to map, measure and gather intelligence about arts festivals and better understand their scope and impact in civic society.

The event brought together professional and voluntary festival creators, artists, funding agencies, policy makers and academics that have a vested interest in this domain to: evaluate current practices, network, assess the contribution of the festival sector's contribution to the cultural life of contemporary Ireland and support festival capacity building.

Festival maker, Jude Kelly CBE, Founder of the Women of the World festival (WOW), former director of the Southbank Centre and theatre creator delivered the keynote address along with both international and Irish festival practitioners.

The conference was the first of its kind to be hosted by the Arts Council and was developed as a response to Festival Policy commitments and objectives arising from the Arts Council's Strategy, Making Great Art Work 2016-2025.

A copy of the conference digital programme can be downloaded here 

GREEN CONFERENCING

The Arts Council set out a ‘greener conference’ commitment to ensure that ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’ initiatives were prioritised as part of the event. Therefore, we encouraged delegates to attend using public transport or car pool with other conference delegates to reduce emissions. We also encouraged attendees to bring ‘keep cups’ for tea and coffee served on the day and water bottles. Water refilling stations were available on site for delegates. The Change Maker programme was published in digital format only via the Arts Council website to reduce paper and ink usage. We also asked delegates to recycle and bring their own lanyards on the day and their own tote bags for any conference materials they wanted to take away.

A copy of our greener policy for the conference can be found here.