
ATD Ireland has recently won first place in the Irish category of the Creative Lives Award for the “Creative Pathways to Participation” publication. The following reflection piece is based on a conversation with Paul – an ATD Ireland Community Activist and a key driving force behind the conceptual theme of the book. Paul speaks about the event in London, the creative process behind the project and the meaning of this kind of recognition for himself and the ATD Ireland community.

“Creative Pathways to Participation” is a piece of work that followed up to “Lockdown Liberties” – a 2021 ATD publication. “We start with yellow and before you know it, we have a rainbow. One project goes into the next one, goes into the next one… from the creative process, there’s so many ideas coming out of us”
The idea for “Lockdown Liberties” was sparked through a Facebook page called “Keep Connected” that was set up during the first Covid-19 lockdown for ATD Ireland members to share thoughts, ideas and creative projects. The page is still active with more than 100 members, consisting of the ATD Ireland community and friends.

“Nothing was being posted on them at first…so I think I started putting jokes up, stupid recipes and pictures, or whatever it was. Then I started making poems and sending them and I knew they (the Keep Connected Facebook group members) would respond to me putting this up… from “Keep Connected” and the writings that were getting submitted to the group that we had, the book “Lockdown Liberties” came from… through this book, we wanted to show what we were doing during lockdown, to keep our sanity and to try break the isolation and keep connected with the group that we had prior to Covid-19…
“When lockdown was finished, I said we need to do something colourful. For people to actually recognise the development within themselves. No intention for it (Creative Pathways to Participation) to go to this level and win an award…
“Creative Pathways to Participation was more colourful, and Lockdown Liberties was of the time… Less text, lots of images, graphics and colours. It was deliberately chosen that the book didn’t look academic or anything. We almost wanted it to look like a comic… Everyone has their picture in it, and they use one key word, like hope and aspire…

“That’s what “Creative Pathways to Participation” needed to be. A focus on what’s positive. You can come in here and talk about your problems all you want, but if you’re not doing anything beyond them, you’re not going anywhere. You’re just regurgitating the same stuff”
For “Creative Pathways to Participation” some people worked on their submissions in the ATD Ireland office, and some people worked on their pieces at home and submitted them through the Facebook page or over the phone through email and texts.
Paul highlighted the importance of participatory projects, where people with lived experiences of poverty are the key drivers. “A lot of times books are being written about poverty, but they are academic type things… and I’m going “that’s not us”. It’s someone else’s reference of us. What they are hearing from us but putting it in their terms. Often there’s a lot of text and a little paragraph talking about what we are doing, and a quote and then more text with someone else’s opinion. I always think, where is the Community Activists voice in this? Where is the celebration of the Community Activist? Of their achievements? Where’s the recognition? While they’re still out there as activists, still struggling, still up against the system. Whereas Dann just says; “what you say is going”. We read it (Creative Pathways to Participation), it reads like “this is us”.

“A lot of the time our voices were not being represented, but rather opiniated on. Whereas now (in Creative Pathways to Participation), it’s our expression. They can have an opinion on it all they want, but that’s only cause they are reading it, they’re not writing it” … That book is us, for definite. People’s personalities, their character and their development, shown through the book
“Lockdown Liberties was us, but Creative Pathways to Participation is all us”

Paul also spoke about the creative process and the importance of creativity for himself and other members of the ATD Community: “We believe at ATD to use creativity as a soft tool for people to get involved in and try to open them up to something… putting themselves into something, like a painting, a collage, a piece of writing, a sculpture, anything. It’s working with the hands and talking…
Reflection on painting:
“I’m not doing it (painting) to be an award-winning artist. It’s because I feel a connection with myself when painting. Time is gone. It’s irrelevant. I could be there for two weeks, and I wouldn’t know…I’m just caught up in that process and it just feels for me that was an enjoyable hour and a half. There’s nothing going on in my mind”
“There’s a freedom in the creative process, with painting, a freedom that I don’t find anywhere else. I like to use other things beside a conventional paintbrush… like steel wool, broken piece of timber, magazine paper, kitchen paper, sponges, and paint with that. I don’t know what I was looking for, but I felt more comfortable using other objects than a paint brush cause if things went wrong I could put it down to the object that I was using”

Reflection on writing poetry, storytelling, developing characters, tongue and cheek humour:
“When I’m writing I feel a bit of pressure that I don’t have when I’m painting. When I’m writing I have to think but when I’m painting I don’t”
“The use of characters is very good cause you can hide yourself in the characters without having to open up”
“I used to hide behind metaphors and euphemisms when I was writing… it was easier for me at the time. People would come back to me after reading it and say a totally different meaning to the poem and relating it to themselves. This allowed people to make their own meaning from the words…

“Then my writing became more expressive. I felt like I could open up more in my writing and be more light-hearted. I never really wrote about nature and the beauty of nature; I was writing about what I had experienced and that was all the hurt I was carrying for so long. So long.
“It was through the creative process that I learned how to manage the anxiety that I was feeling and that to me meant a lot, as in a sense of freedom”
ATD Ireland organises different workshops and provides a safe space and platform for people to explore their creativity:
“When you come in here (to ATD) you will get the opportunity to express yourself, there’s so many places you can go, and you won’t. You’re not told no but you’re not asked either…”
“Creativity helps to break the isolation. It allows your true self to come out”

“Going back a few years, I was already doing poetry, and then we got a fella in, John Cummins, the lead singer of the group Shakalak. He taught us how to rap… none of us could do it before… then we did a workshop with fighting words, through drama, we developed characters and all that kind of stuff. When we first went in there, everyone was kind of frozen… what the hell is going on here? We didn’t know what to expect. Scriptwriters, producers and directors, they were there running the shop with us, and they said “you develop a character, and you develop a character and then you have to respond to each other” …this led to (one of the other ATD activists) starting to write poetry”
“Since they have come in here to ATD, some people have been the first in their families to go to college. That has happened so many times. It is a great tool for getting close to people who don’t want to get close to people. It is a well-known fact that there is a therapeutic value to art. It cathartic.”

When asked about the meaning of this kind of recognition, through winning the Creative Lives Award, for himself and for ATD Ireland, Paul responded: “It just meant like… Finally… here’s something positive and its someone else recognising it…
“None of us would have been coming from getting awards or doing well in school. That wasn’t in our lives, well mine and a lot of the others anyway… “
“The award is for everyone who has ever been involved in any of the projects we have done. And for me that is a higher form recognition cause its outside our circle…
“For years I’ve been waiting for a recognition that I was intelligent, I wasn’t educated in the formal way, so I don’t know why I know a lot of the stuff I know because I wasn’t taught it.
My life has been a long hard struggle which is why it means so much to get awarded, cause its recognition…

‘It’s huge to get recognition for this book in particular because when I first proposed that book, I said, it’s a celebration. People were hesitant and would ask “what am I celebrating?”. I would say “look what you have achieved. You’re now a published author and a published poet” … none of that would have happened if they hadn’t come into us in ATD and we wouldn’t have got through to half the people at all if we weren’t using the creative space. A form of freedom comes out with painting and writing… human nature needs to express itself in some form…
“The voters recognised within the book what we were trying to get across – the positive aspects of everything…
“The way that I look at it is that this is only the start. It took us a lot of time to get to this point where we are the ones being listened to. We are the ones being celebrated…The book I think was a celebration, because it was colourful. It spoke on what was happening, where people are and the obstacles they have overcome… there’s definitely something happening with the likes of this book. I can’t see us going backwards now. So, the next one is going to have to better it, and better it again. We’ll see… were always trying to find new ways and avenues to try get this out to people but in doing that we want the activists and the volunteers to feel appreciated and recognised for their work…and maybe even be rewarded …because it does mean a lot because people who get college certificates for example, they frame them and put them up and their family is proud of them. That has a knock-on effect. You can inspire other people around you – the kids they want to mimic what they see mammy and daddy doing (for example)”
Thank you so much to all the Creative Pathways to Participation participants. Thank you to Creative Lives and all who voted for us to win this award. Thank you to Coalition 2030 for funding the project.
