Melissa Eveleigh

ARTS, COMMUNICATION & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT SPECIALIST

Melissa Eveleigh is a highly skilled arts and communication practitioner, manager and trainer with 20+ years experience in Sub-Saharan/East Africa and South/South-East Asia. She is an expert with the Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities Network and Founder/Director of Arts for Action.

Recently Melissa used participatory community-centred approaches to the design and deliver Camp-wide Communication and Community Engagement (CCE) programmes in the Rohingya Refugee Response. Notably with IOM and UNHCR for legal and human rights education and Protection against Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (PSEA). Generally, Melissa has a proven track record of excellence and innovation in community engagement, strategy design, training practitioners and running campaigns; making demonstrable impact in the areas of refugee rights, access to justice, women’s and child rights, gender-based violence, youth empowerment, health, hygiene, democracy building, local governance and policy engagement.

Melissa has in-depth working knowledge of forum theatre, drama therapy, participatory research, interactive monitoring and evaluation, community dialogue, mediation, community radio, local and village media, mass media for change, personal and social change theories, donor and UN policies and procedures, NGO project management, and humanitarian coordination.

In Bangladesh, South Sudan and Malawi she has applied the arts and theatre practice to legal awareness and the design and delivering National communication strategies to empower citizens to understand and use the law in the resolution of disputes and management of crime.

In Malawi Melissa established a national programme for the arts, and a national network of practitioners using social research, interactive theatre and local media for positive change. Programmes delivered change in the areas of governance, justice, rights, sexual and reproductive health, HIV and Malaria prevention.

In Zimbabwe, she has worked extensively at community level, providing assistance to CAFOD and GIZ to build relations between local authorities and residents in the context of economic collapse and political violence. In Malawi, Kenya and Bangladesh she trained paralegals, counsellors, restorative justice practitioners and social mobilisors for the Bangladesh GIZ Rule of Law programme, designed a 5 year action-oriented communication framework, and developed national initiatives for justice in South Sudan and Myanmar (DFID, EU, FCO programmes).

This film shows how Forum Theatre has been used for legal awareness in Myanmar – Melissa trained the group and developed interactive methods for research, monitoring and evaluation:

Clean Acts: Applied theatre for community engagement on Hygiene & Health with Rohingya children and young people:

In addition to applying theatre process to development, Melissa has devised and directed over 12 major productions, and founded Moving Parts in India where she recently devised a socio-political piece of dance-theatre based upon testimony of front-line medical staff during the 2nd wave of Covid in India: