Ways to Get Involved
What Has Happened So Far?
During the first year, we have been exploring the challenges facing our place and community members as well as what keeps us connected to this place.
Community Partners
We are delighted with the response to our open call for Community Partners – thank you so much to everyone who applied. We really appreciate the interest and although we couldn’t offer everyone a place, we hope that by having public events and surveys throughout the project, you can continue to engage and feel part of this journey.
We are delighted to be working closely with our ten community partners, who you can learn more about by checking out ‘Our Team’.
First and Second Surveys
MCA members and the Steering Group kindly went door-to-door delivering paper or online surveys to every household in Maharees along with our invitation to a launch event that we held in the Green Room in May. We kept that survey running until the MCA Gathering festival at the start of September, where we presented the results so far on what makes Maharees special and what people would like to see in the future:
We developed our second survey based on these open responses to quantify community priorities, concerns, and ideas of what it will take to be climate resilient.
Stay tuned for the results.
Public Events
We held our launch event and three public learning days during the summer of 2024, bringing experts in ecology, biodiversity and climate science and action to the community. These sessions have combined presentations, opportunities for dialogue with the experts, and creative activities together to make sense of the information to our local context.
Stay tuned for more information on our learnings from these sessions!
Creative Explorations
Our approach comes from a place of respect for the Maharees community, and we began the project by taking time to listen and get to know people and place. We hope to hold a space for delving into difficult conversations, as well as facilitating playful creativity and celebrating the project participants’ love of Maharees. Joining the Community Partners on a learning journey, we have explored a variety of subjects through creative mapping techniques.
Helping to preserve the heritage, lore and history of the tombolo, whilst exploring novel approaches to addressing the challenges climate change brings, is important to our practice. As three individual artists, sustainability is embedded in each of our work. We bring that sustainable approach to our shared creative acts in this project, such as: cyanotype printing, lino printing with earth pigments, foraging and cooking together, and eco dyeing. We will also integrate photography, video and sound recording into the process of exploring the challenges the community is facing. At the heart of our approach, is the aim to support the community so that the project has a legacy beyond our involvement.
Creative Coastal Resilience is a recipient of the Creative Climate Action Fund, an initiative from the Creative Ireland Programme. It is funded by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media in collaboration with the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications. Further information on the Climate Action Fund is available at the following link: www.creativeireland.gov.ie