Its important! Arts, Community, Culture and Inequality.

This week Locality are launching the findings from a piece of research we (Leeds Beckett, Social Life and Locality) completed last year for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The AHRC were interested in research that looked at the relationship between access to the arts or environment, reducing health inequalities and the sustainability of this type of work.

Our research findings can be found on the Locality website here.

This research funding stream is linked to the National Centre for Creative Heath and is one of the actions that comes from the 2017 All Parliamentary Parliamentary Group Creative Health Report. This report subsequently influenced the development of the Arts Council England strategy – Lets Create.

There is clearly a growing recognition of the importance of creativity and health in improving health and wellbeing however, national strategies tend to focus primarily on the role of professional artists and creators and on the role of NHS Social Prescribing. While these are important these strategies tend to ignore the fact that it is community anchor organisations that build positive and trusted relationships with people – particularly people who live in areas of high health inequality, using access to creativity and the natural environment to do this.

Our research project ARCHES (Arts and Culture in Health Ecosystems) worked with four community anchor organisations to understand how and why they used access to the arts and the natural environment to build positive relationships with local people.

The four organisations we worked with were:

Halifax Opportunities Trust
ACCM
St Paul’s Trust
Pembroke House

All of these organisations provide a range of activities that build on peoples strengths and interests and create a positive place where people could feel good about themselves and build relationships with each other and the community anchor.

These activities included community gardens and allotments, cooking, oral history, writing, singing and dancing.

Some of these activities were led by arts and environment specialists. Sometimes they were employed by the community organisations and sometimes the community organisation provide the space and the relationships for the arts organisation.

What we learnt

• Community anchor organisations are embedded in these communities. They know that it is their responsibility to build and sustain long term meaningful relationships with the people who live alongside them.
• Good community anchors (of which there are many) understand and facilitate outside experts such as artists to bring their skills to communities, they are not in competition with arts or environmental organisations. They provide a gateway and foundation that arts and environmental organisations can build on.
• Policy makers and commissioners (in arts and health) do not sufficiently understand the important role that community anchors play. They are a key part of the delivery chain – building trust and relationships and through this enabling people to engage with activities that build on their ambitions and strengths.
• Through these relationships community anchors help people to connect with other services which are specific to issues that concern them – these can be as diverse as welfare rights or cancer screening.
• Finally, commissioners such as the NHS tend to:
• • Mainly be interested in funding specific services rather than in ensuring that there is core funding to enable community anchors sustain their primary function which is being there to build meaningful long term relationships with people who statutory service often talks about as being ’hard to reach’.
  • Focus on social prescribing – which places an emphasis on referrals coming from the health system first and often does not bring any funding.

What do you think?