‘The joy, the laughter, the chaos’: Care aesthetics as foundational for communicating the work of community arts organisations

Riverland Youth Theatre (RYT) is a children’s and young people’s arts organisation based in Renmark, South Australia. Through weekly workshops, theatre productions, sensory play equipment and school holiday programmes, they are caring for and supporting the wellbeing of the young people in their community. At this arts organisation, ‘the relationship’, to quote Lillie et al., very much ‘is the project’. In 2023, writer, digital illustrator and admin officer at RYT Kirste Vandergiessen, with the support of Tully Barnett and Sarah Peters, undertook a 20-week project to creatively document and evaluate ‘the joy, the laughter, the chaos’, the intangible and tangible impact of the work that RYT delivers in, for and with their communities so that the company can better understand, share and communicate this work to the broader community of diverse stakeholders. Kirste made her weekly reflections and documentations publicly available on the RYT website across the project (https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="https://ryt.org.au/wayfinder/">ryt.org.au/wayfinder/). This chapter describes the work of RYT and articulates an emerging ‘Care and Creative Documentation’ model for meaningful reporting, which builds care aesthetics into the formal and informal value and valuation practices of arts organisations through creative curiosity, active acknowledgement, relational reporting and embedded evaluation.