Ms Danielle McKenna:

I thank Deputy Cairns. We are based here in Rialto. We work with more than 300 young people from ages five to 25, as we said. Investment to us looks like everything from investment in the practice, the work and the strategies to investment in where we work. Right now I am sitting here in the middle of a Portakabin that is about to fall down around us. It was built in 2008 and we were told it was part of a five-year plan. We have not been part of the conversation on regeneration. When we spoke to the State about facilities and the need for community facilities in our base at the heart of this community, we were asked whether we could go somewhere else, work in a local school or find a temporary building. We said no and that we needed to be in the heart of the community.

Ms O'Connor spoke about relationship building with communities. Workers have been here through decades of work. There are people who live in the community, who have grown up with the project and who now work here in the project. The majority of people who work in Rialto are from the area or from areas like Rialto so they really understand the needs of the community. We are sitting here in a Portakabin with a leaking roof, with lights that often do not work and with very little access for more than 100 children every day. Those are the kinds of resources we need. Resources should be put into the building, the safe spaces, the space where children come to sit and do homework every day, their youth space, where they do their crisis work, their one-to-one support with their youth worker, their developmental processes and, as was mentioned, the arts processes, which is one of the fundamental pieces we really believe in here in Rialto. We believe that critical social education is a real way of radical change. It is not just about giving young people the space where they can explore arts for play, which we believe in; experience and vocation are also really important, as is a platform to have their voices and stories heard.

The bigger question for us is who is listening. We often work with local artists in collaboration and look at the platforms by which we can support young people and communities. There is an intergenerational issue and an inequality that we work with. We often work not only with young people on these projects but with an entire community. It is about putting it out there into the public domain. Who is listening to the voices of young people? All these policies and strategies are great, but how many young people and families from working-class areas are at the table making the policies? Many of them are involved in the strategies that support their lives and the lives they need to live to thrive. That force is very often what art brings. At the moment one of the projects we are doing in conjunction with Fiona Whelan and BrokenTalkers is called What Does He Need? It is about looking at intergenerational masculinity through a lens of working-class communities and that idea of how young men are shaped by but also influence the world they live in, taking a needs-based approach to look at that under a critical social arts-based practice lens. We really believe in the work we do here. We believe in the investment in this work and community and community projects. That is where we think resources need to go.