Impact Experiment of Collective Routes: A Deep Dive into Arts and Culture

Collective Routes is an enquiry-driven collective committed to researching existing approaches, experimenting with new practices, and producing grounded knowledge in social change. As a collective, we bring together socially engaged practitioners in participatory research and collaborative learning across the fields of youth development, social entrepreneurship, organisational culture, culture for development, and social policies.

We are very excited about the Tandem Amwaj project because it will facilitate a space for deeper, multi-faceted engagement with the arts and culture sector in Egypt, as well as collaborate with fellow practitioners and actors from the arts and culture sector, the larger Egyptian civil society. Tandem Amwaj will also be a great platform for connecting with organisations from the SWANA region and learning more about the arts and culture sector(s) across the region.

Our intention is to hold said space in three forms. The first form is hosting a tool fair on organisational resilience. The fair will bring together different actors from the arts and culture sectors, as well as civil society practitioners, to present and reflect on research findings, good practices, and tools pertaining to organisational resilience. The fair proceedings will be documented in English and Arabic and will be made available online for greater accessibility.

The second form is managing sub-grants for three to five youth-led initiatives working in arts and culture in Egypt. The selected initiatives will receive seed funding to implement their projects, in addition to year-long technical support from collective Routes and its network of practitioners. At the end of the year, we will host an open event to showcase the initiatives’ projects and results and explore growth opportunities for the initiatives.

The third and final form is ‘Re-imagining Museums’. Through collaborating with two youth-led initiatives in Egypt, we aim to connect public museums to their contemporary communities and open them up as active culture spaces which promote civic participation. To fulfill this aim, we will create alternative visiting itineraries and storylines for objects and collections currently on display in two museums in Egypt. These itineraries will communicate a more nuanced narrative of the history of these collections, as well as emphasize how they are linked to our contemporary reality. We will use Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods to study the collections and work with the local communities and stakeholders to co-create the itineraries. The itineraries will be launched in an event where we reflect on the itineraries and the methodology that led to their creation, and they will also be published online.

Reflective practice and participatory approaches permeate our work in Collective Routes and we will use these methodologies to trace the outcomes of the project and learn how to take them forward, hopefully to contribute to deeper conversations and collaborations in the arts and culture sector in Egypt.