Sports, arts, elderly, youth, immigrant, local and community development representatives made up a very diverse group who attended the launch of a new community resource in Drogheda this week. EurAV is a non-profit organisation using audio-visual and communication expertise to support both local and international social projects in the areas of climate action, media literacy, social integration, culture and the arts. While they work on a trans-European level, they have set up offices and a micro green screen studio on Fair Street, representing a commitment to the greater Drogheda area.
“We’ve been established since 2021,” explained founder, local film maker Declan Cassidy, “but there wasn’t any point in setting up an office during the pandemic. We’ve kept busy working on projects with like-minded organisations across Europe, but working from home doesn’t give us direct contact with the communities that are involved in many of our projects, so for the last year we’ve been deciding where to set up our base. Drogheda came out on top. It’s well connected to the airport and has a lot, historically and culturally, that we can showcase for our international visitors. There’s also a thriving community and cultural scene, the diversity of which was very well illustrated at our launch.”
The launch event was aimed at introducing EurAV to the local community.
“We’re involved in five international EU projects at the moment,” explained Declan, “and we established a Facebook group which now has a network of about 15,000 organisations across Europe, so we’re quite well known in the EU, but apart from a food based climate action project that we collaborated on with Sonairte, the national ecology centre near Laytown, we’ve only begun to look closer to home to see who is working in the same areas that we’re concerned with, and to see how we might collaborate.”
As well as its administrative offices, EurAV has a small green screen studio at its Fair Street premises from which the organisation has plans to develop community television and online content.
“It’s a micro studio,” explained Declan, “but with the green screen we can change the background to make it anything from a chat show to a newsroom, so it’s really flexible. Our plan is to find members of different groups and communities who are interested in creating content for TV or online and train them to use our studio so that they can help to provide a voice for whomever they represent. We have close ties with Dublin Community Television, Cork Community Television and Northern Vision community television in Northern Ireland, so can be quite confident of having the general programmes broadcast on those platforms. We’ve also set up a YouTube channel called TVIE which we aim to grow into a community TV channel and a further platform to get community-made content out there. The launch event was really about letting the local community know that we’ve arrived in Drogheda and are looking to network with anyone who shares our vision.”
