Social impact
Our art projects support displaced artists to overcome the barriers they face in building sustainable creative careers and earning a living from their practice.
The primary beneficiaries are people in Edinburgh with lived experience of displacement, forced relocation, conflict, war, or persecution, including people who have recently arrived and those who have been here for years but still face significant barriers to Scotland's creative sector and sustainable creative career.
Many of our participants are isolated from mainstream community life; the artist circles create consistent, trusted connections across communities, reducing that isolation directly.
The barriers our participants face are compounding: language, low income, limited professional networks, uncertainty about immigration status, and limited knowledge of how things work here.
Many are skilled and experienced artists whose creative careers were interrupted when they fled.
Our professional development programme addresses these barriers practically through the content of sessions, through the connections we make between participants and institutions, and through the simple act of bringing people together regularly in spaces that feel welcoming rather than institutional.
