Create Gloucestershire’s goal is arts and culture every day for everyone. We enable the right conditions for art, culture and creativity to thrive across the county.
Create Health is our strand that focuses on how we can bring arts and health to everyone because everyone. We work across the arts and health system to grow the relationships and secure the resources to enable the sector to flourish.
Our commitment to high quality arts and health practice goes back to our earliest days- we made 8 pledges in 2012 which described what we stood for and wanted to make happen in Gloucestershire by 2020. Pledge 8 was “Arts and culture “prescribed” as commonly as medicine, providing a preventative and therapeutic solution for those with health and emotional challenges”. You can read our manifesto here.
Since 2012 we have delivered a range of test and learn projects that explore how a creative health framework could complement the medical model. Gloucestershire NHS Clinical Commissioning Group has been a partner in this journey alongside artists, arts and cultural organisations, community partners, patients, and clinicians.
A core value that runs through Create Health in Gloucestershire is co-production. This allows for a personalised and creative response to health needs AND ensures individual and community assets and strengths are drawn upon.
We avoid labels that fix some people as the givers of arts and health and some as the receivers. Create Health favours a fluid approach that recognises everyone has health needs (physical and emotional) and everyone has something to contribute. And that needs and contributions change through life and circumstance.
Co-produced arts and health moves away from the artist or the health practitioner or the commissioner or the patient/participant as being the “expert”. The aim is a creative solution or approach that no single individual could have discovered alone- a collaborative alchemy where some people “unlearn” and some people discover they knew much more than they thought.
Create Gloucestershire hosts a series of place based alliances that allow for arts and health ideas and initiative to be co-created with local residents, artists, health and other stakeholders in the VCSE and public sector. These alliances discuss health alongside education, crime and safety, housing, community spaces and so allow for a preventative and holistic model to emerge.The boundaries between professionals and residents are blurred as everyone works to a shared goal to make a place more creative, equal and safe.
Place based groups are currently active in Cam + Dursley, Matson and Tewkesbury. They are currently meeting regularly on zoom if you are interested in joining any of the calls. https://www.creategloucestershire.co.uk/place-based-cultural-groups or contact: caroline@creategloucestershire.co.uk for future dates.
We are looking to extend these groups to other places across Gloucestershire so do contact us if this is something you think your local community might like to explore.