For you to understand why we use ART and CULTURE in our child rights advocacy activities  let’s first take you through this learning process.

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For us to be able to make child rights advocacy and lobbying more involved, fun and educational, we use the following creative tools:

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• innovative visual-art techniques,

• storytelling,

• social-networking technology,

• exhibits,

• music,

• performance,

• festivals, and

• community gatherings.

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Project  Key Points:

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Key point #1:  We use creative tools to strengthen the understanding and exploration of community values.

Key point #2:  We use creative tools to increase stakeholder involvement.

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Key point #1:

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We use creative tools to strengthen the understanding and exploration of community values.

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Traditional tools for community engagement include public opinion surveys, visioning workshops, town halls, meetings, and public hearings.

These resources are useful in relaying information to the public and receiving feedback. However, traditional tools do not always elicit ample participation and can rarely explore the values and needs of citizens thoroughly. A stronger awareness of citizen values helps to:

• connect community perspectives with planning efforts, and  

• Results in more satisfied community members and leaders alike.

 

Creative tools promote community engagement by strengthening the process of understanding and exploring community values.

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The main creative tools for exploring community values and needs are Visual-art techniques and storytelling.

Visual-art techniques include:

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• Drawing,

• sculpting,

• modelling,

• graphic rendering, and

• Painting.

 

Visual-art techniques (such as the use of illustrations during community visioning exercises) are already being used in planning workshops and meetings. Storytelling is a tool for collective listening and communication.

As a basic visual art, rendering or illustration is a useful tool, long incorporated with planning at visioning and scenario-development workshops.

 

To illustrate concepts, planners incorporate drawing. More recently, drawing has come to involve innovations such as digital imagery, three-dimensional modelling, and the use of physical objects, such as wooden blocks that represent buildings, infrastructure, and other aspects of the built environment. Communities can invite artists to facilitate workshops or have community members lead their own processes. An artist might develop visual aids for the community’s ideas about possible futures by asking what values and needs the community has for the project, program, or design. Those values and needs can then be expressed in an image such as a drawing, rendering, or painting.

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Mural art as an engagement technique can be applied in settings such as celebrations of history, commemorations, and educational events. Community members can paint in small groups, perhaps with the guidance of an artist

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Another approach we are using to explore community values creatively is through storytelling. Storytelling allows people to present ideas about place and experience and to define their roles in those contexts. We incorporate storytelling into our child rights advocacy projects. As a creative tool, storytelling helps us understand how people in the community are seeing, have seen, and would like to see their life being. As an engagement tool, storytelling has two major points of appeal. First, it appeals to the participants because it enables them to share in their own voices. Second, it has benefits for planners because it results in personal feedback and can be conducted with minimal materials.

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Key point #2:

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We use creative tools to increase stakeholder involvement.

 

Planning outreach and engagement is a process intended to incorporate all members of the community, including children, youth, young professionals, and working parents. All of these groups are vital parts of a community, and their participation in planning is important. Encouraging participation can be made easier, more fun, and more effective through the use of creative tools. Creative tools for involving stakeholders include:

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• Arts in schools,

• technological resources,

• informal and formal exhibits,

• performance, and

• gatherings.

 

Arts in schools engage both children and youth with educational programs and planning. Technological resources can be combined with visioning workshops, informal and formal exhibits, performances, and gatherings to engage diverse populations. Informal and formal exhibits can capture multiple audiences’ interest in showing planning materials in both traditional and non-traditional locations such as museums, parks, plazas, and streets—or lobbies, malls, nursing homes, and retail windows. Performances and gatherings provide opportunities for learning from, meeting with, and developing relationships among various generations and lifestyles. Arts in schools programs encourage art teachers, other teachers, artists, and volunteers to work creatively into the classroom or school. 

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CHILD FRIENDLY CONSTITUTION & RIGHTS ART BOOKS:

 

To promote our Arts and Culture activities in the years 2011 to 2015,  NHF-Zimbabwe then known as Defence for Children International Zimbabwe, developed two child-friendly constitution and rights books for ages 3 to 18 which are now  being hosted at the Save the Children online resources center through the links below: 

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https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/library/my-abc-child-rights-colouring-book-promoting-child-rights-through-art 

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https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/library/child-rights-advocacy-through-art-promoting-child-rights-through-art-therapy

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