Client: American Ireland Fund
Project/product:Casebook and newsletters

The project
The American Ireland Fund -- one of a family of funds around the world aimed at helping the Irish people -- recently launched a $100 million campaign aimed at increasing its level of service. We developed a campaign theme ("hope and history," based on a Seamus Heaney poem), and worked with AIF staffers to create a casebook and related publications.

Excerpt:
Sketches of peace and prosperity
Culture is a broad and versatile gateway -- to personal fulfillment, mutual understanding, education, community development, and prosperity. The American Ireland Fund supports cultural endeavors for all these reasons, and more.

We have provided support to cultural initiatives designed to bridge the gaps between north and south. A few years ago, for example, an Irish-language secondary school in Belfast desperately needed financial help. They were not eligible to receive government support. The American Ireland Fund matched the resources of a committed American with the needs of that school, and thereby ensured its future.

More than a decade ago, Geraldine McAteer, a resident of West Belfast, was determined to launch a community festival. But the year was 1988, several soldiers had recently fallen victim to mob violence, and the government was suspicious of any initiative emerging from West Belfast.

"When you're told often enough that you have no hope," recalls McAteer, "you begin to thing that way about yourself. We wanted to take charge of our own self-image." With help from The American Ireland Fund, the first West Belfast community festival took place in August 1988.

Other cultural projects supported by The American Ireland Fund seek to mend another kind of rift--that between rich and poor. Programs such as Macnas theatre group in Galway, Belfast Community Circus School, and the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork work with hundreds of young people every year, concentrating their efforts in poor urban areas where children have few opportunities to enjoy and learn about the arts.

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