Call for submissions: Big Issue x Creativity & Wellbeing Week 2026 - #CriticalHope ! Deadline for proposals 25 March

London Arts and Health, the Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance and Arts & Homelessness International are curating an edition of The Big Issue for Creativity & Wellbeing Week (18-22 May 2026). We are seeking proposals for the following, on the theme of critical hope:

Articles of 300-1,000 words - they must be accessible and enjoyable for regular readers of the magazine, and written in plain English - definitely no jargon!
Creative submissions - anything that could be printed in a 2-dimensional format. This might be a poem, illustration, or something that allows the reader to engage creatively through e.g. a puzzle or colouring-in.

Thanks to funding from Thrive LDN and Arts Council England, we can offer a fee of £150 for each article or creative submission we choose for The Big Issue. We don't need you to send your work now, we're just keen to hear your ideas - we will let you know if you're successful and then you'll have two weeks to produce the article or creative submission.

The theme of the special edition is “critical hope”. “Critical hope” is about realistically assessing the environment through a lens of equity and justice while envisioning a better future. Championed by Paulo Freire, critical hope is an active, necessary, and realistic, rather than passive or naive, stance against oppression and despair. The theme acknowledges the increasing precarity in the health and care sectors including the impending NHS redundancies, ongoing instability in funding for Creative Health and the rising pressures linked to planetary health and climate change. We hope that this edition and Creativity & Wellbeing Week will gather the sector in a space of critical hope, reconnecting practitioners with their passion and inviting visions for the future of creative health.

As ever we're especially interested in hearing from under-represented writers and creatives including people of diverse heritages, genders and sexualities, people identifying as d/Deaf, Disabled or neurodiverse, and younger people...