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Getting creative with our wellbeing

5 minute read
28 March 2024
23:10 - 23:10

Posted by:

John McMahon

For Creativity and Wellbeing Week, our arts and health lead John McMahon interviews Victoria Hume, Director of the Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance.
20 May 2021

Posted by:

John McMahon

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Two people smile at each other as they appear to begin to dance together in an open space.

John McMahon (JM): Thanks for joining me for this discussion Victoria; first things first – what is Creativity and Wellbeing Week and when did it start?
 
Victoria Hume (VH): Creativity and Wellbeing Week is a national – and increasingly international – festival celebrating the positive impacts culture and creativity have on our health and wellbeing every day. 

It was originally established by London Arts and Health (LAAH) in 2012 as a way of bringing together the incredibly diverse world of arts, culture, health and wellbeing and giving all the organisations and creative practitioners leading this work across London an opportunity to promote their practice and build a sense of collective endeavour. Three years ago, the Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance (CHWA) started to partner with LAAH to expand it into a national festival, which - as you can see from the geographic spread of events and organisations - has been a huge success.

JM: How do people and organisations get involved?

VH: Anyone can register their events during the week – whether they are online or offline. They can be special events or things you’re already working on. We’re also encouraging people to use this as a space to just tell us about what you do as an artist or organisation to support health and wellbeing. It’s all about showcasing the breadth of practice and helping people find each other. People can also use the hashtags #CreativityAndWellbeing and #CreativityAndWellbeingWeek on social media.

Primary school aged children take part in painting a wooden box and collecting twigs in a forest.
Photo by Artsmark - Senacre Woods Primary School. Photo @ Xavier Fiddes / Senacre Woods Primary School
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JM: What is Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance (CHWA), and how is it contributing to Creativity and Wellbeing Week?
VH: CHWA is a national, free-to-join membership organisation for anyone who is invested in the relationship between culture, creativity, health and wellbeing. We’re supported by the Arts Council as a Sector Support Organisation. We have around 6,000 members and work with regional champions and strategic members around the country to support the grassroots innovation that has built this work, and to make sure people are able to access the latest information, best practice, resources, research and peer support. We’re striving to be an alliance in the truest sense of the work, dedicated to amplifying our members’ work and building the collective strength of the work. Join us

JM: What impact do you think the pandemic has had on understanding of culture, creativity and wellbeing?
VH: That’s a hard question to answer, I think we’re still seeing this develop every day, but it seems clear that many of us have turned to creativity and culture to get us through the pandemic. The research tells us that access to creativity and culture supports our mental health and our resilience. There’s no question we will need this more than ever in the next few months, as we try to make sense of what’s happened to us in the last year. At the same time, however, the Audience Agency and Centre for Cultural Value have published data that makes it clear that inequalities of access have been exacerbated by Covid, so there’s a lot of work to be done to prioritise creative and cultural work that helps us to “level up” and tackle health inequalities.

For me, this depends on partnership. You can see very clearly from the case studies of practice we’ve been gathering during the pandemic that the majority of organisations and freelancers who have managed to work with people  shielding at home, or living or working in hospital, or in residential care, have done this in partnership with local authorities, the NHS, and other community organisations. What we need now is long-term statutory investment – at a local and a national level - from the health sector, that matches the willingness to partner and helps us build more partnerships like this.

It’s important too to mention the absolutely critical role voluntary arts organisations have played in sustaining the community’s and people’s spirits, and keeping us in touch with each other. We need to reappraise our sense of who and what is culturally valuable. It’s great that Let’s Create is founded on similar principles!

A facilitator helps an older person listen to a pair of headphones
Photo by Bluecoat & Belong. Photo © Belong
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JM: Please could you tell us a bit about your journey to working in arts and health?VH: Back in the late 90s I was trying to work as a singer in London, and inevitably needed another job to get me by. I started temping in the NHS and fell in love with working in hospitals. I was lucky that an opportunity came up to work at one of the relatively few arts-in-hospitals programmes then in place, at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital. I saw the impacts of working with creative practice in health spaces - more than anything the way it could make a hospital a community centre, no longer somewhere you might dread going, but a place you could come to for succour and inspiration.

After a couple of years I moved on to start a new arts programme at Royal Brompton & Harefield hospitals. We started with a budget of £12,000 a year from the hospital’s charity, and built it up into a huge programme of performing and visual arts, including the Singing for Breathing project, which is now in its 14th year, amazingly. After that I lived in South Africa for some years and whilst I carried on working in hospitals, I had my assumptions about creativity and health put through the wringer, and started to learn more about the long, defiant history of participatory arts, much of it influenced by thinkers from the Global South like Augusto Boal. Now I’m very lucky to be working at the Barnsley-based Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance with my colleague Hayley Youell. 

JM: Finally – what are your favourite creative activities for your own wellbeing? Have you tried anything new during lockdown?
VH: I still write and play music (thank you Lost Map Records!), but like a lot of people really struggled to do my creative thing in the earlier stages of lockdown, which was helpful in some ways because it made me realise how important it really is for my wellbeing. As you and I have said before to each other, it’s easy to spend your life advocating for this work and simultaneously forget to do it yourself. I’m trying now to build music back into my daily life again. Not easy but if I can manage it, it will definitely help stave off the burnout we’re all skirting around at the moment.

About the Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance

The Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance’s vision is a healthy world powered by our creativity and imagination. We are an organisation driven by the collective power of our members. We connect, amplify and support their work to transform people’s lives and communities through culture and creativity.

Find out more

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