Written by Dr. Ada Xiaoyu Hao, Evaluation Project Manager/KTP Associate, University of Roehampton
If you are a small community organisation, you may spend more time writing funding applications than delivering the work itself. If you work in mental health support, you may feel trapped between overwhelming demand and limited capacity. If you run community activities, befriending programmes, or creative workshops, you may also find yourself competing with neighbouring organisations for the same shrinking pots of money, often with little time or structure for genuine collaboration.
Increasingly, many organisations are operating in a constant state of anticipation: preparing for cuts, uncertainty, safeguarding pressures, staff burnout, and rising social need before they fully arrive. This is not only an organisational issue. It is becoming a psychological condition of public life.
Across the UK, schools, libraries, charities, and arts organisations are quietly absorbing forms of emotional support once held elsewhere through extended family networks, stable public infrastructure, or long-term local provision. NHS England data suggests that around one in five children and young people now experience a probable mental disorder, compared with around one in nine in 2017. Prevention therefore requires more than clinical intervention. It requires somewhere for people to go: physically, relationally, and repeatedly.
Earlier in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the University of Roehampton and a mental health charity, I spent time working with Portugal Prints, an arts and mental health studio founded in 1979. Across different locations and changing funding climates, people continued returning to this kind of space for more than four decades. Not because it “solved” their lives, but because it offered something increasingly rare: continuity, recognition, and the possibility of return. That idea of return matters.
We often discuss creative health through the language of outcomes and impact, but spaces of care also function psychologically. They become rehearsal spaces for living alongside uncertainty. Places where people practise trust, routine, expression, coexistence, and temporary stability in a society that increasingly feels fragmented and accelerated. At the same time, older models of community provision are under pressure to evolve. This is not simply decline. Organisations such as Allkind are attempting to develop more integrated approaches across education, health, and community systems: embedding arts and drama therapists within schools, strengthening evaluation frameworks, and building collaborative partnerships that can survive within current realities.
What interests me most in the current KTP work is not the evaluation of art therapy alone, but the wider implementation architecture around it: how creative and therapeutic thinking can be embedded relationally across institutions rather than isolated within single projects. The question is no longer whether one workshop or intervention “works.” The question is how schools, charities, universities, healthcare systems, and communities can collaborate without reproducing exhaustion, competition, and fragmentation. Because risk is increasingly shaping not only policy, but behaviour. Institutions adapt to survive. People do too.
Critical hope, to me, means resisting the idea that this adaptation must lead to emotional narrowing. It means building systems that still leave room for slowness, dignity, collaboration, and return.
Not every space can remain unchanged forever. But if we lose the ability to create places where people can pause, gather, and rehearse being human together, then we risk producing a society that knows only how to manage crisis, never how to live beyond it.
The challenge ahead is not simply sustaining services, but sustaining the conditions that allow people to feel held within community life. Across the UK, organisations such as Allkind, universities, schools, and community partners are beginning to test what those future models of care might look like in practice.