Introduction
Victoria Hume, Executive Director
In December 2025, Deborah Munt stepped down as a founding non-executive Director of CHWA. We continue to work with Deborah in different ways, but in the meantime we’re so grateful to Deborah for her generous reflections about her time as a Board member, below. Her piece was initially written for CHWA's Board, but we wanted to share it more widely, and to sing, too, for a moment about Deborah’s frequently unsung decades of work to champion creative health.
Like many of the people who have driven this work, most of Deborah’s influence has taken place through thousands of hours of unpaid work sitting on Boards and working groups and committees. Often the seeds of change are so deftly placed that we forget who sowed them. It’s important to remember that they come from people. And in the case of creative health, they come often from freelancers. Deborah is leaving the Board a year after we finally found a way to pay Board members for at least some of their time – a long overdue recognition that freelancers so often cannot afford to influence strategy; and if they do choose to do this work, it comes at an unacknowledged cost. We're so grateful to Deborah for shouldering this cost: for the time and thought and – perhaps most importantly – care she has brought to shaping this organisation and how we work.
Deborah’s commitment to the idea of creativity as a way of being rather than a nice-to-have activity will continue to be deeply influential not just on CHWA but the wider sector. This is about creativity as a human right, and bringing creative thought into all our systems – bringing artists into health boards, supporting healthcare professionals in cultural institutions, seeing creativity as a determinant of health. Astonishingly, all of this is all happening now, but when Deborah and I both started working in creative health in the late 90s, this was the radical unknown – the very edge of what felt possible. It has been brought into being by the twin superpowers of our sector: persistence and generosity. This is what Deborah exemplifies: the persistence to bring unfashionable ideas into spaces where they are ridiculed or dismissed, until one day they are, suddenly, accepted. And the generosity to let these ideas spread without claiming them as one’s own. To effect change just by fighting to be in the room, again and again, to bring us back to our values.
CHWA: Ibasho
Deborah Munt
Last year CHWA piloted a personal development budget for its Board. I used mine to part-fund a Personal Essay and Memoir writing course at Ty Newydd Writing Centre in Wales. It was brilliant in more ways than I will recount here...so thank you CHWA. If there’s budget to maintain this pilot, I would whole heartedly recommend it, as it made an important difference to me. Inside.
One of the things the course encouraged is a practice of Free Writing. Hand to paper on a random topic and just keep writing…without judgement or too much thought…keep writing. Then review what you have put down and circle 5 snippets that represent the moments in which you found your true voice…. where it really sounds like you. Where, if it was read by someone you had never met, and they subsequently met you, they would be left in no doubt that it was you. In trying to find my true voice in this practice I think I have figured out why stepping down from CHWA made me so wobbly. CHWA is where my true voice was welcomed…where it belonged…and where it could shape things along with other true voices.
I have been working in creative health since 1995. Then, it was not what it is now. I have spent so much time with health, wellbeing and culture professionals alike and felt we were speaking totally different languages. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one who advocates for wholesale ‘speaking the same language’, because what that can easily mean is sacrificing what makes us distinct, what makes us ‘us’, and for me that misses the point. That’s a topic for another time, but there have been many times when I wanted to affect change, make something happen, fill a gap, improve systems, and would either be met with a blank stare, or the knowledge that what would happen would be a smaller, diminished version of what I had in mind. I imagine we’ve all been there. It would leave me feeling empty, queasy, unnerved, alienated and frustrated. Out of sync, and out of place.
CHWA represents the change in all of that for me. It steadfastly works to inspire and support the kind of changes I long for, and it is not performative at all. It models how things can be done differently. Embeds care like Blackpool through rock. Pays attention to the how, not just the what. It makes compassion and love the substance of it all, not just the afterthought, or the nice to have. At a time when such things have been elbowed out of focus, because they don’t lend themselves to being easily counted, CHWA centres them again. Stubbornly. And that’s the thing. Arts and health, culture and health, creative health…whatever we call it…will always remain niche, marginalised and sidelined whilst ever we articulate it solely as art form, because that right royally misses the point. Artform is crucial. It is one of the key ways by which we express who and what we are, and what we understand and feel, but it is only part of the picture. Creative health is so much more than that. It is an energy, a way of seeing, being, thinking and doing. It is a mindset, a driver, a constant process of tenderly (and sometimes not so tenderly) questioning and provoking, so that we can do better. It is an essence, a spirit, and a generous and soulful way of being with other people. And of course, whilst I always wondered why so many others didn’t see the need for this throughout the years, I realise that perhaps many of them did, but that it was not always convenient or comfortable for those who were embedded within those systems and places that we sought to challenge and change. There is a price to pay for cognitive dissonance. Adhering to prevailing narratives, for some, is a way to survive…whilst those that don’t often burn out. CHWA is so important because it is the spirit of that change made manifest. It has come from a people who have also felt they were speaking different languages most of the time. It started with those people finding each other, finding shelter from the harshness of being out there, finding a place to rest, be nourished and recharged with other kindred and unanchored souls. A place to be reassured and held, and a place to be safe.
The Japanese concept of Ibasho has always struck a chord with me –
'a place where a person feels a sense of belonging, security, and acceptance, allowing them to be their true self’. Originally meaning "whereabouts," it goes beyond a simple physical location to include the feeling of being connected to a place or community… an Ibasho is a space where you feel safe, secure, and accepted for who you are.’
And that’s what CHWA is for me. It represents the change we want to see, manifest as a small home for thousands of people who feel dissatisfied with the status quo, but who also have the boundless care, compassion, ideas and abilities to do something about it. It’s a place for all that to reside, where there didn’t used to be one. As people’s minds and hearts congregate, they generate an energy that becomes visible to the naked eye, in a way that it wasn’t before. For many that then becomes the source of energy itself.
CHWA is the closest I came, professionally, to that place of belonging. A place where what you believe should happen, happens. Where people have the courage to walk the walk. Not to wait until the conditions are perfect, but to just do it anyway. It has been an absolute pleasure and privilege to walk this walk with you all. Now, you must take excellent care of the CHWA home, and people, going forward because that is everything. To forget that, as time passes and people come and go, would be disastrous. The job as guardians of CHWA is to pass on the understanding that it is not flash, not fast, not easy, not convenient and not done…the job will never be done. It’s a work in progress…and that progress really matters. It is bloody hard work. It’s not magic. Yet it is.
CHWA is a home for all those souls like me, like us, and long may it continue to be so.