Founded in 2006, Askeaton Contemporary Arts (ACA) aims to promote and provide contemporary visual art to the locale of Askeaton Co Limerick. Within this, Welcome to the Neighbourhood is an annual programme of invited international and Irish artists who live and work in the town of Askeaton.

By developing community involvement and understanding how art might be produced and experienced in this locality, ACA aims to open up new possibilities of how contemporary art might operate outside a city environment, while concurrently supporting the production of new artists' projects.

The primary audience for the festival is the population of Askeaton, approximately 2,500. Their interaction with the artists and artworks is not only as spectators, but often they are actively implicated into the development of the artwork itself through their assistance or participation. This strand is developed through ACA's activities each year.

Four editions of Welcome to the Neighbourhood have been staged, introducing the work of artists from Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Bulgaria, United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, and Ireland to Askeaton. ACA has advocated an experimental approach to the production of artists' projects, furthering an understanding of the possibilities of the project in a very broad cultural sense, and allowing for the development of the festival as a fluid conceptual model rather than as a more traditionally-structured event.