About

Since its inception, Townhouse has strived to make the arts accessible to different groups of society, whilst using them as a powerful medium for integration and understanding. The gallery's Outreach Program offers a number of arts workshops for adults and children, through which we are able to reach participants from all over Cairo, including those with special needs and from marginalized communities.

The SAWA Workshops for the Visual Arts take place every Saturday and welcome individuals from diverse ethnicities and socio-economic backgrounds. SAWA (meaning "together" in Arabic) originally started as a small workshop for refugees and has quickly expanded to become the gallery's most successful outreach program, reaching over a thousand individuals a year. By providing a communal, un-politicized space where people - regardless of race, gender or class - can become involved in the different aspects of art production, the SAWA workshops break down obstacles of communication and understanding. In 2008, SAWA spun off a workshop for children and adolescents, called SAWA Generation.

Past Outreach programs developed by Townhouse have included the Friday Workshops for Working Children, currently on hold due to lack of funding. The Friday Workshops provided a creative space where child laborers could express their individuality, build peer relationships and develop their communication skills, bringing them a confidence and self-esteem that can be applied to their daily lives. The workshops encompassed instruction in different fields - visual arts, animation, theater - and included day trips to places outside of the children's immediate locale, as well as literacy classes and topics pertaining to the rights of children.