Trust the Process | Ep.3 – Luís Correia, Samra Said & Damien McGlynn

Trust the Process is a podcast about socially engaged arts that invites you to trust the unconventional nature of artistic processes and, more importantly, the impact they can have over time. This project is part of the Ask, Pay, Trust the Artist campaign and is supported by the Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts.

This episode is a bit different from the others, as it marks the beginning of a special series that unfolds throughout Culture Action Europe's Satellite BEYOND gatherings.

This interview was recorded during the first of these gatherings, which took place in Riga in mid-April 2026 under the title "Different Times, New Solutions". Nurturing these conversations was a shared intuition: that moments of disruption also carry possibilities for re-imagination, and that culture does not simply react to change, but actively generates it. In a context where democracy can feel increasingly fragile, threatened by the long shadow of conflict, grassroots artistic practices often emerge as acts of care, resistance, and collective agency. This is why socially engaged arts became a recurring thread throughout the conference discussions, with fellows from the Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts directly involved in the programme.

Throughout the episode, you'll hear the voices of Luís Correia, representative of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and collaborator of the Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts, who gives us some more detailed insight into the rationale and intentions behind the creation of the Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts and its flagship programme: the fellowship.

Together with Luís, socially engaged arts practitioners and fellows Samra Said, co-director of Arts and Homelessness International, and Damien McGlynn, Director of Create Ireland, take you through a conversation on what it really means to move at 'the speed of trust’ in the process of co-creating with a community, digging into the limits of short-term project-based funding, and on what it takes to create the conditions in which socially engaged arts can truly thrive.

Enjoy listening.

Special guests:

Luís Correia, Samra Said & Damien McGlynn

Music credits:

Original music by Kerem Çelikoğlu

Episode produced and hosted by:

Sara Bandinu, Culture Action Europe

This podcast aims to spark an ongoing conversation around socially engaged arts — one we hope to nurture by collecting grounded stories of change-making. If you are a socially engaged practitioner and would like to share your experience, feel free to get in touch at sara@cultureactioneurope.org — I would love to hear from you!

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:04

Hi, I'm Sarah from Culture Action Europe and welcome to Trust the Process, a podcast about socially engaged arts that invites you to trust the unconventionality of artistic processes and more importantly, the impact they can have over time. This project is part of the Ask Pay Trust the Artist campaign and is supported by the Alliance for Social Engaged Arts. When we mention social engaged arts, we refer to collaborative community-centered practices where artists and participants co-create artistic responses to social, environmental, and political issues. In this space, artists and cultural workers share their experiences and reflections on how they foster local ownership and active citizenship through art and how their work creates change-making impact, giving voice to both the successes and the challenges encountered along the way. Enjoy listening. For this episode, I'm taking you into a special setting that marks the beginning of a new series of interviews unfolding throughout Culture Action Europe's Satellite Beyond Gatherings. The satellites are a pilot attempt we embarked on to decentralize conversations around culture in Europe by better understanding the lived realities, the pressures, and the hopes shaping the work of cultural actors across contexts, and later translate those experiences into forms of advocacy that can resonate at the EU level. The first of these gatherings took place in Giga in mid-April 2026 under the title Different Times, New Solutions. At the heart of the conversations was a shared intuition that moments of disruption also carry possibilities for reimagination and that culture does not simply react to change, it actively generates it. In a context where democracy can feel increasingly fragile and threatened by the long shadow of conflict, grassroots artistic practices often emerge as acts of care and resistance. This is why social engaged arts became a recurring threat throughout the conference discussions. And that is also why fellows from the Alliance for Social Engaged Arts were actively part of the program. No worries, throughout this episode you hear the word fellows quite a lot, and little by little the people and practices behind that term will become clearer. But before going further, it probably makes sense to pause for a moment and hear directly from Luis Correia, representative of the Calusekulbecan Foundation, to better understand what the Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts actually is.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

The Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts is a collaboration between philanthropic funders based across Europe. At the moment, we are 13 foundations. We began with 11 a year ago in early 2025, and we seek to skill the recognition, resources, and international connections of the socially engaged arts field, by which we mean uh artistic practices with a focus on co-creation with communities, uh developing artistic responses uh and work uh in tackling social issues that are relevant to local communities. Um we came together as foundations that are investing in this work at a regional and national level, and we understood that there actually is a lot of commonality between the work that we're doing from you know uh Switzerland, Portugal, UK, and other regions that are part of the uh represented by the foundations in in the alliance. And we saw on the one hand that the organizations are often tackling similar issues from climate change to migration to homelessness, and often also employing the same methodologies uh and using this same artistic methods. Yeah, they lack opportunities to connect internationally and to work together as a field. There is a lot of fragmentation, a lot of fragmentation in terms of uh the language and the communications and advocacy around socially engaged arts.

SPEAKER_03 4:36

Different countries use different terms, and although that diversity is great, it can also be Luis went on to explain that one of the reasons behind the creation of the alliance was a recurring difficulty faced by socially engaged arts practices across Europe. They often fall into a kind of in-between space, where they are sometimes perceived as not social enough for the social sector and not artistic enough for the cultural one. Part of the response to this fragmentation was to create spaces for cooperation and peer learning. Spaces where practitioners working in very different contexts but often facing similar challenges could meet, exchange methodologies and learn from one another. The alliance chose to shape this process through a fellowship program, as Luish explains, not only to support individual practitioners and organizations, but also to create stronger collective connections that could build confidence and advocacy around the field itself.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

Our flagship activity is a fellowship program for leaders of socially engaged arts organizations that has a focus on capacity building, uh professional development, and organizational development for these organizations that work at a very local level but with a very strong potential to create impact beyond themselves. So the fellowship works at different levels on an individual level because we want to grow the confidence, the skills, and the connections of the leaders themselves on an organizational level because we provide capacity building and resource financial resources that go to the organization so they can deepen the work that they do. As well as on the collective level, there's a strong focus on advocacy and engaging with each other. We provide a mobility fund as well for the fellows to visit each other and to go to events and develop work together.

SPEAKER_03 6:40

Now that you have a clearer sense of what the Alliance for Socially Engaged Arts is and who the fellows are, I can finally introduce you to some of the practitioners who kindly agreed to share their voices for this episode, offering us a glimpse into the work they do and the struggles they navigate. From Riga, we now move mentally towards the archipelago formed by the United Kingdom and Ireland. The first voice you will hear is that of Samra Said, co-director of Arts and Homelessness International, a network in the UK that works to create positive change to people, projects, and policy in homelessness through arts and creativity. Alongside her, you'll hear Damien McLean, director of CREATE, which is Ireland's National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts. This means they focus their work specifically on a collaborative form of social engaged arts practice. One part of their program is managing a funding scheme, the Artist in the Community Scheme, on behalf of the Arts Council of Ireland. But it makes more sense to let them speak directly about what they do and how they do it. Let's begin with Samra.

SPEAKER_00 8:02

We work to bring positive change to people, project, and policy in homelessness through arts and creativity. We focus on connecting and strengthening individual artists and projects and advocating for arts to be part of homelessness support and policy. We do this through events, international exchanges, research and training. And I also produce a program called the Associated Leadership Program, which is aid creatives on artists who are have been homeless to provide them with a year long of development, of training, of uh creative budget where they can pursue their artistic practice. And we uh at AHI, as we would like to be called, we passionately believe in co-creation. So that's a lot of the methodology that shape our work or center to our work. And 50% of our board and staff uh as well as associate have lived experience of homelessness.

SPEAKER_03 8:59

Okay, right.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

We have something in common with what summer just does so much, I think. We we got to so um Damien invited us earlier this week. Oh no, it wasn't earlier this week, it was um uh earlier last week uh to their staff meeting, and we got to learn so much, so much that we have in common in terms of the way we do training, where we do advocate advocacy, the way we advocate for artists and creatives to be um in the ecosystem of policymaking.

SPEAKER_02 9:28

Yeah, there's there's there's a lot of similarities. Um I often I I think I came into the fellowship thinking that we were quite different to everybody else, because because other people's organizations are maybe more focused on delivering work on on the ground more. Um, whereas Create is what we would call a national resource organization. So we're kind of an umbrella and a sort of support for the wider um field of collaborative arts practice in Ireland. So, like a lot of other national bodies, we do that stuff around training and development and opportunities for artists, and then we also we do the advocacy role, so we we sort of deal with funders and policy makers on a national level, and we also then try to connect on international level. But it's all about trying to create the conditions for collaborative arts practice to flourish um and for people to be able to do what they need to do, do it to the best that they possibly can. And we're definitely not there, we don't have the best conditions, but that's the role that we've been playing, and we've been doing it since we were founded in like 1983, so we're going a long time, but um yeah, that's that's the kind of role that we play. It's more support and developmental rather than focused on delivering in one particular area or or any project you know it's broader than that.

SPEAKER_03 10:52

So both Damian and Samra have channelled their energy into creating structures of support for socially engaged arts to take root and flourish over time. And while the practices they enable can take many different forms, listening to them speak, some recurring characteristics begin to appear. A strong attention to process rather than outcome, a willingness to leave space for uncertainty, a way of working rooted in collaboration, where decisions are shared, and outcomes are not fully predetermined. In this context, participation is not simply about being included in someone else's vision, it is about shaping the direction of the work collectively as it unfolds.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

But for us, the collaboration is the key part of the whole thing that that the the artist or artists working together um and the community that they've um partnered up with, that they work together as equals, that there's collective um kind of co-creative decision-making processes and that they're each respecting what they bring to the project, and it's not things aren't predetermined. We often go into these projects with ideas, but if somebody sends us an application and says, Oh, I'm gonna do this and we're gonna do this on week six and this on week eight, and by the end, this is what'll happen, then we think, well, where is the room for the the collaborative decision making for the kind of fluidity that we know exists in these projects? So we're more interested in how somebody is going to manage that exploration through a collaborative methodology, and what emerges is the right thing if you've had the right process.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

And that's similar to us. Like, I think it's really difficult sometimes for I guess external institution organization to understand that we're not in control of the output, we're not in control of the outcome. Um, a lot of that process is co-created. Um, so like for example, we run an art lab um uh advocacy research and training uh labs, which is like six sessions of a topic.

SPEAKER_03 13:06

So the topic before we go on, just a small clarification here regarding the initiative Samra is mentioning to give a little bit more of context. The Arts and Homelessness International Art Lab Enquiries are spaces where social issues and research questions come together to form new perspectives in the field of arts and homelessness. These enquiries are co-produced from design to delivery. So they grow organically from project to project, tackling a variety of topics.

SPEAKER_00 13:41

So the topic, the prompt of the topic is there, but the output isn't really predetermined. So it's co-created with um all the stakeholders that come in to the we don't even use, I've just realized today we don't even use the word participants. So they're all people who are going to this project or um session at an equal thought where we co-create our community agreement, you know, what how are we going to work together, what stays in the room, what stays outside the scope of the room. Um, and then once we, you know, unpack that research question, be it women and homelessness or be it um I current my current alliance for socially engaged um art leading question um is around uh the lived experience leadership and and fair pay and trust building. Like so all of that is not predetermined. So it's just going through that whole process where we meet in in session after session and unpacking all of that, and then you know, this could the outcome could be an artistic response. What the key thing, the response is always artistic, but what it is, we just don't know. So it's always a lovely surprise right at the end. If it could be like a zine, like the one you are working on, or it could be a mural, or it could be um a visual art piece.

SPEAKER_03 14:51

The conversation kept unfolding, and like many conversations with thoughtful people do, it slowly began to shift the terms through which I was looking at things. Because beyond the inspiring stories and the everyday work of care and commitment they were describing, Samra and Damien also challenged some assumptions that can easily slip into the way we speak about socially engaged arts. For example, at a certain point I connected their work to the concept of empowering communities, but their response, delivered with a lot of honesty and reflectiveness, completely reframed the question for me. Because when co-creation is taken seriously, when participation is not symbolic but genuinely shared, the point is no longer to empower someone else from the outside. The process becomes something much more horizontal, more unpredictable, and sometimes also more uncomfortable. It asks everyone involved to relinquish a certain degree of control and to accept that the direction of the work cannot be fully decided in advance. And perhaps this is also what it really means to trust the process.

SPEAKER_02 16:11

Yeah, I think that's difficult. Um we were talking about this some of us recently, and kind of you you can't you can't predict what's gonna happen, so you shouldn't necessarily have an expectation of what's gonna happen at the other end, and getting away from that idea that you know, and we we all end up doing it writing funding applications where we say we're going to do this project and it's going to empower this community or it's going to change people, but again, that comes from a kind of a top-down hierarchical view of these things that you have the power or the right to try and do these things to those people, whereas the process is more what are we going to decide is the right thing to do together. And obviously, a lot of those outcomes do happen, like people change things, people are more empowered, they start to develop something much bigger than the initial project. Um, but we like we wouldn't have fixed expectations of what that is. Um, and we have a lot of artists that we we give funding to for projects, and then they call us like halfway through, kind of going, oh no, it's all gone crazy. I I've lost control, and we're like, no, that's fine, like that's this is natural, and and those are usually the ones then that it comes to a much better place at the end because they've they've gone through the messy bit, so yeah, we're equally like really surprised at what comes out, but normally like amazing things come out of it, but we wouldn't, yeah, we wouldn't expect a specific thing.

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Yeah, similar, for example, like the um so the associate leadership program, which is um every year we take eight artists and creatives who are or have been homeless. Um, it's starting very soon, so we just selected the eight, so it's really exciting. So the program has been running for the past few years, and we took a pause last year, we called it the Festival of Learning, where we just evaluated how the program has been doing in the last three years, and some of the things that came out where people really wanted more learning sessions. So even though the program is starting soon, we haven't uh planned those learning sessions. The only thing that's in place is the date. But once those, once the eight artists have been orientated, once we co-create and to co-design those sessions with them, then we'll start the planning. So it's all the things where we we call it at Arsenal Home International, we call it uh a freedom within a framework. So we have a framework, but there's a so much freedom within it, and that freedom goes back to the people that we're supporting. And they are the ones who co-create what that looks like, um, how you know how it's going to be shaped, what kind of session they want, what they want, you know, what are their goals, etc. Um, so yeah, so even you know, there will be obviously there was a point where we do a little bit of a check-in to see how things are going. Um, but there's lots of freedom within it, which just makes it really exciting. But I think um when I first joined, um, particularly because my own value is a bit of an autonomy, it's my own value. So going to a space where everything is created. Um, one of my colleagues Matt uh Peacock, who actually founded Arsenal Home International, he used the analogies of um Rock of Brighton. I don't know if you've ever seen it, it's like a suite, it's like a rock of stick or stick of rock. Stick of rock. Stick of rock, that's it. Um, and if you break it, it has Brighton written on it throughout, basically. Um, and the idea is that's how we do co-creation. It's just not only at the start, it's not just throughout the end, it's throughout the whole process. Um so initially, when I first started, I felt quite in conflict with that because I was like, oh, I can't have to wait until the 15 people come into the room and co-create some decision. And and and then the more you got to know the process, the more you really realize there is um this whole idea of where a system where it gives us less hostile, you know, where you feel like, oh, you know, uh you're only one decision away from failing, it's actually amazing because it's it's co-creative. So that means we are all of us are taking ownership of this project. We all have equal foot on it, we all care about um how it does and how it does. So yeah, so there's been yeah, it's been quite progress, personally for me in terms of my own development, um, how I pursue co-creation in my own everything.

SPEAKER_03 20:18

This idea of locating value in the time spent with communities, in the relationships that slowly build trust, and in the process of making rather than in a final fixed outcome, might sound almost radical to some ears. But in reality, it is a long-standing tension within the cultural sector. Over time, it has surfaced in ongoing critiques of funding frameworks that rely heavily on predefined outputs and so-called impact measurement. As if the value of a socially engaged artistic practice could be fully anticipated and verified in advance. And yet, asking a socially engaged artist to define their outcome from the start can feel a bit like asking a researcher to already know the answer before the inquiry is even begun. It also raises another more practical question. What happens when projects are forced into rigid timelines with clear beginnings and endings, even when the work itself is rooted in long-term relationships? What is lost when something that is still unfolding has to be posed or closed simply because the structure of funding requires it? Leaving processes that are by nature relational and ongoing suspended in something temporary and increasingly dependent on unstable resources.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

Um again, it's really similar in terms of the. Thinking and yeah, people use different phrases, so a lot of people we know or work with might talk about moving at the speed of trusts, and you know that it's it's about you know you can't just push people into the next phase if the trust isn't there, you have to be conscious of that. Um, I've also heard people talking about it, um, or similar ideas, term of social a social license that you you don't have the kind of the permission from the community to just plow ahead, so you don't. So you wait until you have this sort of license, social license from the community that, yeah, okay, we understand what we're gonna do and we're happy to proceed. But again, the the kind of traditional idea of funded projects, the model is so based on everything being predetermined, having this set timeline, and oh, we have to hit this marker by this date, and we have to deliver X, Y, and Z, the number of workshops that we said, and it doesn't allow for any of that that kind of trust and care and collaboration. That um, I guess answering your question, how how many times or how often do we see things kind of maybe exceeding our expectations? It happens all the time. Oh, all the time. All the time. But it I think it happens more where there is the trust and the freedom for them to do what's best. If if we like we try to be really flexible with the funding that we distribute, and it's funding from the arts council in Ireland, so there are certain kind of restrictions, parameters that we have to operate in, but but we're really flexible and really supportive in how we work with the people that were funding um the artists and the communities. Um so where we see that they've understood that we're flexible, we see them kind of sigh of relief, sort of, and then they think, okay, so I can do what I know is the right thing to do rather than fudging this and rushing it along because I was worried that you need me to write up a report by next Wednesday. So so because we take that approach, I think we we we help to develop um a practice with the artists and with communities and all their different partners, where then they're able to do the best work they can. But it's not all on us and it's not all on the artists, like people are working in really challenging contexts, working in all sorts of settings like healthcare settings or like refugee centers, things like this, where there's all sorts of other um issues that might make it really, really difficult. Yeah, all sorts of things that you it's not easy for any one person or for us as like the funder or supporter to to make those issues go away. But so you have to be able to work with the freedom to navigate that in the right way rather than saying, oh well, an application we wrote nine months ago said we should do this now. That's not helpful for anybody.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

And like also kind of think about like uh and like I guess like is there isn't and end dates of the project? Like, so like something we we try to do all the time is like the next day of the last day of the project is the most important day. Like how we actually live in the communities, are we leaving them better off? Like, are we are we creating conditions for them to continue um the process they have had? Um has there been any training? So, for example, um with our associate leadership program is one-year leadership program, but the at the end of it, we train all of the eight on on all our processes, how we do training, how we do producing, how we do you know, how we work. So we have a flat structure. So we, you know, um all of us are on the same salary and all of our freelancers and contributors are on the same day, right? Um, so we make sure there is um a paved pathways for them to either continue working uh um uh with us at the same level, um, or you know, there's a um a pathways, alternative pathway for them. So the next day we always try to say the next day is the most important day. Like, how do we make sure there is a support in place, um a legacy in place, uh a training in place um to support people beyond um yeah, beyond the end of the project.

SPEAKER_02 26:07

That's it. I would just say like there's nothing wrong with projects. Projects are great and great things can happen in short enough periods of time, but it is an issue. Certainly, we experience it in Ireland where like the only funding that's really available is project funding. So you don't have this ability to work, you know, over time with real sort of purpose and stability. So great things happen, but then it's done and nobody will fund it to continue because it's oh, you you've had that project funded before, you have to think of something new and innovative now. So it's again, it's hampering the kind of impacts that a lot of policy makers would love to see because they're only interested in supporting something really short term with this idea of certainty of what they're gonna get as a return. And it's not good for anybody again, as I say. I think what what we need is again trust-based kind of funding models that allow, you know, you understand an organization like us who've been going for 40-something years, like just trust us to do what we do and not not keep us on this hamster-wheel cycle of always trying to justify the funding, you know.

SPEAKER_03 27:16

We may feel at ease or not, with words like impact, especially considering how often it has been stretched, instrumentalized, or reduced to something like a compulsory proof of value within funding cycles and project applications. But there are other ways of thinking about it. Here, impact can also be understood as something much quieter and often harder to measure. The small unexpected shifts experienced by the people involved in the practices Samra and Lanian described. The kinds of changes that rarely fit into evaluation forms or indicators, but that nevertheless shape how people move through the world afterwards. These are not easily translated into metrics or reports, but they are visible in how people carry themselves afterwards, in the small shifts that ripple outward beyond the duration of a project. And in those moments, the work speaks for itself. You have been listening to Trust the Process, a podcast on socially engaged arts that is part of the Ask Pay Trust the Artist campaign by Culture Action Europe, realized with the support of the Alliance for Socied Arts. If you are a socially engaged practitioner and would like to share your experience, feel free to get in touch. You can find my contact details in the episode description. Before we wrap up, a few credits. I'd like to thank all the artists, curators, and cultural workers who opened up and shared their stories with me. Thanks as well to everyone who supported me and offered advice along the way. Thanks to Kerem Cherikogru, author of the music of this podcast. And finally, a big thanks to you for listening all the way through. See you in the next episode.