Voluntary Arts – arts and health website and articles
“Anita picked up a complex project and almost single handedly delivered it in record time, so that the organisation had something which we had promised for a long time. She is gold standard – reliable, intelligent, innovative, understanding, able to interpret a brief WITH the client. She really listens, suggests without being critical or patronizing. I trusted her, and her regular and comprehensive reporting back really helped me as a client, enabling me to let go and let her get on with the job.” Ginny Brink, Voluntary Arts (also Wales development manager for Macmillan Cancer Support)
Voluntary Arts is the development agency for voluntary arts groups (ranging from choirs to quilt-makers, dance groups to painting societies, drama groups to samba bands). Its head office team was keen to promote and expand on the work that one of its regional teams had carried out in the area of arts and health.
They’d already published a book, Restoring the Balance: the effects of arts participation on health*, but wanted to go a step further. They wanted to convince health professionals that voluntary arts groups could be a low-cost (or no-cost) way to involve patients in creative activities that would benefit their health – particularly those with long-term conditions such as stroke, Alzheimers and heart disease.
We agreed that the work would involve:
- finding more evidence to back up the arguments for the value of the arts/creative activities for people with long-term conditions;
- creating a website so that information about arts and health could be found easily;
- raising awareness amongst health professionals of the case for the voluntary arts;
- making links with some of the long-term conditions charities.
See the website
www.healthysocialcreative.org.uk
Read the articles
A new way of looking at creative activities and health – Occupational Therapy News
Creative opportunities for patients’ wellbeing – Primary Health Care (evidence-based journal for the nursing profession)