HOW WE WORK
Creative Action
How displaced communities shape their own change.
Creative Action is CAFAR’s method: Identify · Understand · Transform — delivering one promise, community authorship.
The steps are simple. The skill is in how you do them. CAFAR specialises in surfacing what a community holds but rarely says aloud, supporting the process with the right creative tools at the right moment, and bringing in the expertise — clinical, legal, health, research, and creative practice — that gives each community-authored solution real rigour. There is no fixed toolkit; we draw on a wide repertoire and adapt it to each community and challenge. We don’t design the answer — we make it possible for a community to build it themselves.
01
Identify
We surface the challenge — and the strengths — together.
We begin in the community, not in an office, using creative tools that let people name what they are living in their own terms — and just as deliberately, we surface the strengths already there.
In Women’s Rights Now: a community think-tank at Imvepi helped frame what mattered, then forum theatre performed the problem — never the answer — so neighbours stepped in and spoke the causes themselves.
02
Understand
We uncover what is beneath the surface
Naming a challenge is not the same as understanding what drives it. We support the community to go deeper, choosing creative tools that let people examine hard, often unspoken things safely — until they reach their own analysis of the real causes.
In Women’s Rights Now: body mapping explored the norms people carry, and role-play made visible the everyday ways men and women interact — dynamics that usually go unquestioned.
03
Transform
Understanding becomes solutions the community owns.
Everything surfaced and understood becomes action — designed by the community, and made to stand up by the right expertise, brought in at the right moment. We train facilitators and leaders from within, so none of it depends on us.
In Women’s Rights Now: community paralegals, trained through role-play and theatre, now run legal clinics and demand change in public forums; and Village Savings & Loan groups, born from the economic insecurity the process surfaced, have seeded micro-businesses and real income.
THE PROMISE
Community Authorship
Every step points to one outcome. The community surfaced the challenge, understood its causes, and designed the response — so the solutions are theirs to own, sustain and lead, long after we step back.
In academic terms, this is human-centred design. In ours, it is community authorship: the people who live a challenge are the ones who should author the answer to it.
THE REPERTOIRE
The creative tools we draw on
There is no fixed toolkit. We choose, adapt and combine whatever fits the community and the challenge — these are some of the tools we work with.
Forum theatre
Performing a problem so the community steps in and rehearses its own solutions.
storytelling & Myth
Processing difficult experience safely, at one remove, through shared narrative
Photo-voice
Communities capturing their world through images, then telling the story behind them.
Expressive Visual Arts
Giving shape to what is hard to put into words.
Body mapping
Exploring experience, memory and unspoken norms through the body.
Play, movement, Sport
Building trust, safety and connection — especially with children and young people.
Whatever tools a project calls for, the engine underneath is the same — creativity as a way of seeing new possibilities, and imagining solutions a community can build and own.
