Laura is leaving her role as a regional lead with CHWA after a very busy year, and here reflects on her time in the job and what's emerging in the region. We'll miss her! If you'd like to be our new Derbyshire Creative Health & Equity Lead, the deadline is 28 May - you can read or listen to the job description here.
At this moment of heightened financial insecurity, the Creative Health community needs to strengthen itself into a community of practice.
I’m sad to be leaving my CHWA role to put all my energy back into Derby Museums, as Head of Curation. I’m looking forward to continuing as a Regional Champion for CHWA and feel it’s a good time to be handing over relationships forged and work very much in progress. Time for a reflection blog on this wonderful role in creative Derbyshire!
So far in my journeys of discovery in Derbyshire I've met a lot of creative, skilled and determined people who are developing new work, building relationships, finding funds and delivering brilliant programmes that have positive health impacts for participants. In the current context this feels at least a little astounding, as the culture, and wider VCSE sectors, have had much of their more dependable funding cut (in many cases completely) and I have also encountered a real sense of vulnerability and fear - particularly for the survival of organisations and the programmes they provide for participants.
This will come as no surprise to many of you. I want to reflect a little on the power and challenge of collaboration in this context of vulnerability, and what that means for my role as a regional lead for CHWA as I think about handing over. I often talk about this role as seeking out ways to build stronger infrastructure to support Creative Health in all its diverse forms to flourish. A significant element of this is drawing people together – convening, facilitating, connecting and networking people across different organisations/freelance spaces. At this moment of heightened financial insecurity, the Creative Health community needs to strengthen itself into a community of practice. When budgets are tight, work is more likely to revolve around project-based funding; there is less scope and opportunity for horizon-scanning and attending potentially useful events - including attending the work of other organisations. There is very often a reduction in reflection time, and personal development/CPD often drops out of our working picture – these are essential and yet often become the ‘nice to haves’ that we feel we can’t prioritise. Delivery to deadlines takes precedence over everything else.
This delivery does bring rewards – experiencing the impact of the work and drawing energy from it; this is what motivates most people working in creative health spaces, but I’m also sensing a significant amount of concern and frustration where work can’t reach its potential due to lack of capacity – perhaps the marketing couldn’t be prioritised or a relationship couldn’t be maintained or the desired data collection was beyond reach. Collaboration can support this, with partners sharing the load and bringing different strengths, but relationships bring their own labour and can be time-consuming to build. They also rely on time to horizon-scan and I’m repeatedly finding that even in single organisations or areas, there is a lack of connectedness as wonderful people can’t keep up with what each other are doing.
This is a space in which the CHWA role exists – in particular connecting people across different sectors and disciplines, creating events drawing key partners together to connect creatively, and offering support to those who are offering their time and skills to draw partners together to collectively develop programmes and find funds. I’m working, through relationships with Arts Derbyshire and the University of Derby, to explore how Therapeutic Arts students and creative health practitioners might be drawn together to share skills and discuss the competencies and relationships needed in the creative health ecology. This will draw on the Creative Health Quality Framework and a recent Roundtable developed by CHWA and funded by Arts Council England exploring training/development needs (report forthcoming). I’m also supporting a consortia of creative, voluntary, health and community organisations in Chesterfield to build their relationships and trust. Their partnerships might accelerate quickly if a submitted funding application is successful, but they are sensibly prioritising their relationships so that they can push forward their vision with or without funding success. What that vision is, how creative health threads them together to drive positive local health impacts and what they all bring and expect from working together is something we’ll soon be exploring through facilitated sessions that I’m currently helping to design and deliver.
I’m also part of a group of committed folk from Arts Derbyshire, Derbyshire Public Health, Air Arts and NHS colleagues, who are planning a cross-sector event this autumn exploring what we need to support creative health and create momentum in Derbyshire for collaborative, strategic and impactful future work…
Simply put, this is an exciting time to work in this role…
Derbyshire Creative Health & Equity Lead: deadline is 28 May. Read or listen to the job description here.