What if health funding followed wellness not illness?
Image credit: Joe Magee
This is the question that sits behind our Create Health strand - a series of test projects to develop and understand how to live well.
Our experience in Gloucestershire and evidence drawn from practice across the UK and internationally, confirms that arts, creativity and culture are a fundamental part of living well.
But despite robust and compelling evidence, arts and health still sit at the margins of our health service. This isn’t because laws or policies rule it out – but because of the dominant model of healthcare in the West that givies priority to medicine and too little to prevention or the management of chronic conditions.
In Gloucestershire we are fortunate to be working with artists and other organisations doing ground-breaking work to champion community health and wellbeing. For example those involved in The Creative Health Consortium and Arts, Health and Wellbeing Centre which is coming soon to the University of Gloucester.
CGs role
CG’s role in this emerging and exciting arts and health ecosystem is to join the dots and bring previously disconnected people together. We hold spaces where everyone can contribute equally and benefit from the diverse skills and insights around the table - whether from an artist, health or social care practitioner, those with lived experience, a carer, a community member, a business person or a voluntary sector representative. All perspectives are valued, shared and explored to unlock new ideas and possibilities.
What’s happening now?
We are currently working with the NHS in Gloucestershire to co-produce a creative health programme to understand the role of arts and culture in tackling health inequalities in the county. This includes a new talent development plan to grow the number of artists and organisations confident and skilled to work in this field. All of the test projects in the programmes seek to challenge traditional structures and ‘ways of doing things’ so that arts and health can be better resourced and reach more people.
Members of Strike a Light Youth Theatre after performing on a train (funded by the community chest).
Community Piggy Banks
A group of local people in Matson, Robinswood and White City ward who com together under the banner of Culture Matson, have taken the opportunity to make funding decisions to improve the health and wellbeing of residents for their community.
The group co-designed a Community Chest (known in the group as the ‘piggy bank’) and have created a radical approach to accessing the funds. There is an open application process for and by anyone in the community who has an idea to grow wellness.
The amount of funding available, the applications made and discussions about how to improve the ideas, the impact and learning are all shared transparently. So, as well as having quick access to high quality arts and health activity which robustly meets locally identified needs, residents and community leaders are also growing their confidence and skills in making funding decisions. They have access to better quality information - which they have determined to be the right information - and the knowledge that their voice is heard and valued in the process.
“The Culture Matson community chest has given us quick and straightforward access to small grants which has supported a drama group for young people on the estate. As a group Culture Matson have learn’t a huge amount about how you decide about grants and what you have to do when you aren’t in agreement”
Naomi Draper Artistic Director GL4 CIC and Matson resident
Open Up Data
Another Create Health experiment challenges the lack of data collected about community-based arts and health activity which is often delivered informally by freelance artists or voluntary groups.
In Cam and Dursley we are testing a mapping tool to notice the “ripples” that were made by ‘Off we Go’, an arts and health project created to support people to re-engage with their community after Covid 19. Participating venues looked at new social connections that participants had made, and the next steps people felt confident to take after participating in the workshops. This is an innovative way of capturing the impact of arts and health interventions on wellness and another step in a vital process to capture how wellness is grown, not just how illness is diminished.
Reflecting on the impact of the project through ripple mapping.
Look out for our next blog which will share more about what we discovered about the impact of ‘Off we Go’ through insights gained from using ripple mapping …
You can find more blogs, useful resources and links to other organisations working in this area on the Create Health pages on our website. To get in touch with us about anything you’ve read about here, please email Louise at louise@creategloucestershire.co.uk.