Creative evaluation - two Duncairn poems
What does creative collaborative impact evaluation look like? We can’t wait to show you.
A few weeks ago we invited two groups of people from the Not-a-Membership scheme to join a special creative workshop. They didn’t know much about what was going to happen, except that we would ask them to reflect about their experience of the Duncairn, their memories here and what it all means to them.
Our brilliant writer and performer in residence Aoibh Johnson took the lead and engaged participants in exercises to unlock their creativity. She gave them prompts to express their feelings and their hopes, to recollect the best moments lived at the centre.
Participants were then invited to create a poem together, selecting one line each choosing from the wide range of expressions and words that were already on paper.
The experience was not only fun, and sometimes emotional, but it prompted an engaging discussion about the present and the future of the Duncairn in the local community, most importantly it conjured the image of a future Duncairn as people would like it to be.
We were moved by the poems our community created, and we hope you will also enjoy reading them. So here they are.
A fiery passion
A bird soaring in the blue skies
A session of cultures
Coming together to make new stories
Together we sail
New life, new beginnings, new starts
The blossoming of a new spring
The embrace of your best firend
The Duncairn is fiery passion
A beating heart
Peace, connection, understanding, joy
Together we create
Empowerment, worth, belong
A welcome confrontation
Take me to the window
Where I found myself again
A pizza with lots of toppings
And the smell after rain
Pure joy in everyone’s faces
Excited, nurtured, understood
Take a risk
You are a human on a ship with sails
Ta muid le cheile ugus ta muid an-sasta
Under the tree which supports all ideas of creativity
A new welcomed confrontation
With a sense of delicious and creative people
Where the sunflower peeps through
