Age Friendly Ireland invites proposals from creative organisations (national and local) and individual creative practitioners who are interested in collaborating with us on the delivery of regional creative initiatives for older people.

Context
Age Friendly Ireland, a shared service of local government that manages the national Age Friendly Programme, and Creative Ireland in the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport Gaeltacht and Media have developed a partnership to deliver creative initiatives for older people in 2022. This work is being rolled out in the context of creativity supporting health and wellbeing in older age.

Six regional initiatives will be delivered with Creative Ireland funding in the Age Friendly regions this year.

These initiatives will be co-designed with Older People’s Councils, which are established as consultative groups under the local Age Friendly Programme in each local authority area representing the authentic voice of older people. There is a strong social inclusion dimension, with a focus on participation, in the proposed work and a desire to include harder to reach older people in the community.

We are seeking proposals from a range of creative practitioners, and especially from groups or organisations with experience of working with older people and on Age Friendly creative initiatives.

The key objectives of this programme are to:

• support the participation of older people, and the wider community, in creative engagement both in terms of audience participation and producers of the creative outputs, while simultaneously offering opportunities to improve health and
  wellbeing, reduce loneliness and isolation and increase social connections in their communities
• to enable Older People’s Councils to co-design creative programmes and support the implementation
• to develop a programme that is tailored to the needs identified in the region and build on existing capacity in the region
• to implement creative programmes that can be sustained beyond 2022 to support the uptake and participation of groups more at risk of social disadvantage
• to ensure the diversity of communities is reflected in the participation and outputs of the programme, especially welcoming participation from those who have not previously engaged

Please find information & guidance document below:

Calls for Proposals Age Friendly Creativity_FINAL – pdf

The closing date for submissions is the 31^st of March 2022