Arts Mid North Coast: Building resilient communities through the arts

Arts Mid North Coast (AMNC) is the peak regional arts and cultural development organisation for the Mid North Coast region of New South Wales. Their work covers the five local government areas of Port Macquarie-Hastings, Kempsey, Nambucca Valley, Bellingen and Coffs Harbour and embraces the area associated with the Biripi, Dunghutti/Thunghutti and Gumbaynggirr Nations.

Following the Black Summer bushfires of 2019/20 that significantly impacted their region, AMNC embarked on a series of Creative Recovery training workshops to support their creative community to develop recovery focussed projects.

“As an organisation, we realised it wasn’t business as usual for us and we had to respond in some way to support our community,” AMNC Executive Director Olivia Parker said.

AMNC invited Creative Recovery Network’s Scotia Monkivitch into the community to deliver the training sessions which equipped more than 50 community members with disaster recovery and preparedness knowledge and facilitation skills to help their communities. This focus was further supported through a range of grants delivered in the second half of 2022 for local practitioners to run creative recovery projects in the region.

AMNC have shared the following video about the training program featuring participants talking about the impact it has had on their practice and how arts-based projects have supported their communities in their recovery.

If you’d like to read about the individual projects supported by the grants program, you can find a comprehensive listing at Arts Mid North Coast. 

If you are interested in organising Creative Recovery Training for your own community, you can find out more here.