Avant-Gardening is a socially-engaged arts and environment project aimed at engaging all sectors of the community with environment, communication and sustainability issues through art, gardening and community engagement. Young and old alike will come together to unleash their creativity in thought-provoking but fun workshops and activities. Avant-Gardening aims to solicit the community's creative responses to their shared environment; the public spaces they interact in and their inter-personal relationships. Communities come together to rethink their own environment or explore perceptions of their community through an ongoing and organically evolving programme of arts which will give a voice to the participants and involve them in cutting-edge arts projects and activities. Avant-Gardening brings fun and creativity into the city's urban green spaces and encourages participants to reconsider their local environment and their interaction with it.

Avant-Gardening is a collective of artists and curators who are all experienced practitioners of socially-engaged collaborative arts and are selected for both the innovation of their practice and their commitment to broadening access to the arts.

The aims of Avant-Gardening are:

• to enable participants to gain a better understanding of current environmental issues so that they can make informed choices about their decisions and actions and creatively explore and share their own responses to these issues
• to facilitate a dialogue between participants and artists and policy and decision makers. Creatively responding to their environment and the positive changes they can effect within their community
• to engage people with innovative arts workshops which;
  • support lifelong learning, social cohesion, personal development and individual and community aspirations.
  • have a positive impact on the local environment and the wider community
  • provide positive arts activities for young and 'at-risk' youth and communities that do not usually engage with the arts.
• to attempt to find solutions or an increased understanding of identified questions through a creative exploration of environmental and sustainability issues
• to develop high-quality art projects which have wide appeal and lead to innovative end products that engage and surprise diverse audiences

These aims will be achieved through a programme that introduces participants to contemporary arts practice and environment and sustainability issues. We will work with artists with an interest in the urban environment and socially-engaged practice to develop ambitious projects that are as artistically valid as they are socially-engaged.

Avant-Gardening is developed and programmed by Paul Green and Polly Brannan