'Not a Single Tree but an Ecosystem: Building Cooperation, Communication and support’
The panel at the Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliiance Conference in Barnsley October 2023
Pippa Jones, CG’s founder and director was speaking at the Culture, Health & Wellbeing (CHWP) Alliance Conference in Barnsley as part of a panel convened to discuss how arts organisations and the health sector can work better together.
Other panel members were:
DARTS who create art with people in Doncaster to improve life, learning & health
The Artists’ Represent Recovery Network who offer professional development programme open to freelance, ethnically diverse artists who identify as black, brown, people of colour who have faced systemic racism, and who are working in arts & health in a participatory or community setting.
Arts and Health Hub who help artist discover their tribe and flourish.
The Cultural and Creative Industries team at Greater London Authority and the NHS Greater Manchester Integrated Care who in Nov 2022 launched the Greater Manchester Creative Health Strategy, aiming to become the first city region in the world to realise the power of creativity, culture and heritage in addressing inequities and improving the health and well-being of its residents.
A recording of this discussion will be available soon. Check the CHWA2023 Conference page for updates.
The need to take time to build trust across arts and health sectors and with communities came out loud and strong throughout the discussion.
At Create Glos we’re interested in how we create more chances for people to access high quality arts and health provision. At the same time we want to make sure we level the playing field for those who have been poorly served - if served at all, by the arts and health sectors.
We want to see the gap close - not only between the arts and health sectors - but all the other sectors that determine how healthy we are; such as education, housing, employment and criminal justice.
We have a long term strategy to build relationships and trust in this wider ecosystem and are slowly seeing this careful work result in an infrastructure of togetherness. We are doing this so we can nourish artists and communities who want to co-create.
However, we’ve come across major problems around the issues of money and governance. Namely, how much money does the system give to arts and health? And who decides who gets the money? There are a couple of problems that keep surfacing.
Problem 1: Currently health investment follows illness not wellness. Art interventions are usually funded in correlation with illnesses so there’s not much funding for artists or communities who want to help people ‘live well’.
Problem 2: Decisions about who gets the money are not made by the people doing the work or the communities that ‘receive’ the provision. So the outcomes/outputs/activities and expectations are all set down before something starts and are disconnected from the practice and the people.
This ignores the importance of co design and inclusive decision-making and is counter productive to co-creative practice. We need to turn this around so that there is more collaboration and investment at a local level that can bring more resource to wellness.
The Big question is HOW?
Over the last few years we have been running micro-tests to try and find out what an alternative might look like.
We started with a Community Chest that belongs to Culture Matson (CM), which is a long-standing group made up of local people representing organisations such as the police and housing as well as community groups, schools and artists that have come together to form a creative alliance. The group provides an infrastructure to grow relationships and build togetherness.
The group have been meeting every 6 weeks for 5 years in the Matson, Robinswood and White City area of Gloucester. Look it up and you’ll easily find the usual stories of places like this - that there is great deprivation, violence and poverty. What you won’t find so easily is the untold story of commitment, care and creativity. You will find all those things in Culture Matson, which is not a constituted or formal group, but a group of people who come together because they care about, and want to make things happen, for their community.
In 2022 and 2023 CM secured some test funding from the NHS Clinical Commissioning Group to establish a Community Chest - to be used for arts and health projects in the area. The group decided together which projects they would fund and agreed rules, behaviours and terms of reference to help manage the process. Crucially the money belongs to no-one and is available to everyone in the community. To keep it like that the group has used CG as its fiscal host. They haven’t had to nominate someone to “lead” the group to get the funding. Instead CG has provided behind the scenes support to allow them to focus on making high quality arts and health.
The emphasis within the group is on co-operation, not competition with members working together to give advice and support as well as partnering on projects. These values supports the work of Elinor Ostrom whose work was inspirational for this test. She received the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences for her Theory of Collective Action which stated that ‘the use of common resources should fit local needs and conditions: Rules should be determined by local interested parties.’ She essentially dismantled a long held belief that people will compete over resources if they are given control of them. Her field work - like ours in Matson disproved this. She showed that when communities owned a small finite resource- such as a forest, fishing lake or pasture they used it so the resource was sustained not exploited.
What about a Community Chest just for young people?
Moving forward we are going to keep trying and learning whether this alliance model might provide a different way to commission arts and health. We are testing the concept of a Community Chest for young people in another area of Gloucestershire, Cam & Dursley. So this time we’re looking at a demographic, not geographical test.
Watch this space.
Read more about Culture Matson
Read more about the Matson Community Chest
Read more about Cam & Dursley Creatives
