The Art of Inclusion

The conference was scheduled to be hosted by the Cope Foundation, in Cork (Ireland), but the COVID-19 crisis pushed it online. This event was one of the outcomes of our cooperation with the Cope Foundation and the European Association of Service Providers for Persons with Disabilities (EASPD). This partnership has resulted in building bridges between cultural organisation and service providers for persons with disabilities in the field of arts.

We already have a tradition in this area: during past project fairs in Vienna (2011) and Helsinki (2015), network members built cooperation projects on arts and disability in the framework of the European Grundtvig programme. This work was extended in our Seminar on Social Innovation, in Segovia, in 2017, with a working group on ‘Social Innovation when Working with Special Needs Groups’.

Our cooperation with the EASPD started out in 2016 with an agreement on mutual exchanges of information and good practices beween our two organisations. After working together as dissemination partners for two European projects - ABBA (creative Europe) and Creativity In Arts Education (Erasmus+) -, the next step was the co-organisation of the conference The Art of Inclusion.

The Cope Foundation, one of the EASPD's leading partners in the field of Arts and Inclusion, was the third co-organiser and did an excellent job in the preparation of the event.

Over 400 participants attended the conference, qualified as 'one of the first of its kind" by Gerard Quinn, Special UN Rapporteur on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.