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22155 Educators providing Courses

London Arts and Health

london arts and health

London

We are London Arts and Health! We support artists, creative practitioners and health professionals across the whole of London and beyond. Promoting excellence and engagement in the field of arts and wellbeing, and extending the reach of the arts to communities and individuals who would otherwise be excluded. Through our activities, we work to promote, develop and support the understanding of what the arts can do to contribute to a healthy society, in London and nationally, and by so doing to encourage the use of the arts in settings beyond the mainstream. We are the leading support sector organisation, advocate and expert for arts and health in London. Our vision is that the power of arts and culture transforms and enriches Londoners’ lives and health. WHAT WE DO We hold industry events, share information and opportunities through our newsletter to 5.5k subscribers, and publicise arts and health activity by sharing on our social media channels that reach around 20k users. We deliver arts and health training and creative wellbeing sessions to health care staff to bridge between the arts and the health sector. We are a member led organisation and have spent a lot of the past year talking and listening to our members. We have focused on digital solutions during the lockdown and explored ways of supporting a sector in crisis. We undertook in-depth research of our beneficiaries and developed a tool for practitioners, the Digital Sandpit. We created and launched a new digital tool, pARTner up to support the Thriving Communities Funding bid, which encourages cross-sector partnerships and supports cultural organisations of any size to be on an equal footing. We have recently released a new website commissioned by the GLA, containing the Arts and Culture Social Prescribing Mythbuster Guide. The resources include information, resources, case studies, podcasts and an animation for anyone interested in cultural social prescribing in London. We deliver a yearly Creativity and Wellbeing Festival that went from a small London festival to national in 2019 and saw over 50,000 attendees taking part in around 600 events. The week is held in partnership with the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance. For ten years much of our work has been supported by Arts Council England and we are proud to hold the status of National Portfolio Organisation. London Arts and Health is a registered charity and a company limited by guarantee. It is governed by a Board of Trustees and is run by a small staff team as well as a number of fantastic volunteers

Social Life

social life

London

What makes a boundary? How we circumnavigate London is often imagined through its hard materiality of bricks and roads, staggered by open, green spaces and meandering waterways. Yet the sensory experience of moving through the city plays a significant role in how we percieve place, define neighbourhoods, and establish routes and routines. In mid June, Social Life hosted a workshop as part of the London Festival of Architecture, which aimed to explore how sight, smell and sound impact our perceptions of boundaries. Our approach drew closely from a toolkit developed by Saffron Woodcraft and Connie Smith at UCL's Insitute for Global Prosperity - the 'Sensory Notation Toolkit' - which was created with the intention for 'researchers to become alert to their different sense and how these are stimulated by particular environments.' Workshop participants walked with us on a short route around Elephand & Castle. At each stop we asked participants to record their sensory stimulation on a scale of 1-5 for each of the six sense: visual, aural, kinetic, thermal and chemical. We used a visual sensory chart to capture the data to understand what the concurrent themes were for each space and overall which space had the highest and lowest level of sensory stimulation. Building on Social Life's earlier work on sensory stimulation and psychgeography in our local area, our 2017 'Feeling of the Place' project, the workshop aimed to look more closely at the relationship between our sense and how this guides our perception of boundaries. The sensory walk was an exercise on connecting sights, smells and sounds as elements of boundary making and unmaking. Two boundaries were chosen for the exercise, Strata Tower by Elephant and Castle roundabout and a pedestrial barrier in the Newington Estate close to Peacock Yard where Social Life is based. Participants were asked to stop on either side of the 'boundary' and record their sensory stimulation. The stops differed dramatically. Whilst one was located in the middle of a blooming community garden others were located right at the foot of Strata Tower, surrounded by the hustle and bustle of urban life. They were however only a short walk apart. The responses were fairly predictable. Participants noted feeling unwelcome and feelings of unpleasantness in areas that were less human scale and contained less greenery. Aural stimualtion - negative or positive - scored highly for many participants with many connecting unpleasant feelings with wind, loud noises and also temperature.