City Beats: A Creative Community Partnership Initiative at ArtPlay

The City of Melbourne's ArtPlay is open to children and young people aged 3-13 years, and provides a wide range of artist-led programs that serve a broad community within and outside the municipality. Its sister facility, Signal, caters for young people 13-22 years. An Australia Council of the Arts funded Creative Community Partnership Initiative, the "ACCESS Program," implemented at ArtPlay and Signal, involved diverse groups of children, families and young people in four artist-led projects. The projects were assessed using a researcher developed creative and community development evaluation framework. This article reports on one of these projects, City Beats, which involved a partnership between the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and ArtPlay. (Contains 3 figures and 5 footnotes.)