Create Strategic Plan 2026 – 2031: People, Practice, Progress

Design by Clare Lynch

Create is Ireland’s national development agency for collaborative arts, enabling artists and communities to create exceptional art together. Their mission is to develop, model and advocate for the conditions that enable collaborative arts practice to flourish and for artists and communities to be supported in creating work of depth, meaning and purpose together.

They invited me to develop their new five-year Strategy through an extensive consultation and co-design process with artists, communities, funders, and other stakeholders, as well as Create’s trustees and staff team. I am delighted to say the Strategy has been published in June 2026.

The purpose of the strategy is to meet the world as it is identifying key priorities that respond flexibly to the pressing issues facing artists and communities across the island of Ireland. It positions Create not as saviours, or the source of all the answers, but as an enabler of the conditions for collaborative arts to thrive. A catalyst of meaningful opportunities for artists and communities to explore what it means to be together, imagine together, and create together in the times, places and contexts that they exist; and of the powerful contributions to shaping wider societal change that collaborative arts practice can make.