We are at a moment when western societies face an existential choice. Your mission to mobilise the arts in the service of health and wellbeing symbolizes and illuminates that choice. Are we, in our society and in our public services, to embrace the values of creativity, humanity, empathy and reciprocity? Or are we to continue with the barrenness of materialism, competitive self-seeking, anomie and bureaucratic crassness?
Alan Howarth, Address to Culture, Health and Wellbeing International Conference, Bristol, 25 June 2013
The Staff and Board at CHWA would like to pay tribute to Alan Howarth, Lord Howarth of Newport, after the announcement of his death on 10 September. Like our friends at the National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH), we will miss him, and want to acknowledge the enormous impact that Alan Howarth had on our creative health world through decades of support. Lord Howarth was President of CHWA from its formation – this was a small acknowledgement of all Alan had done to help lay the foundations for the new Alliance. His support for us as we grew as an organisation was consistent, self-effacing, generous and thoughtful – ensuring our members’ priorities were represented in key debates, validating our concerns and our successes, and helping us find ways to articulate them to wider audiences. He believed strongly in what creative health represented – rooted, in his words, in “the values of creativity, humanity, empathy and reciprocity”. He listened carefully to the people doing the work and benefiting from it, and took his steer from this experience. We hope we can build on his legacy in the same spirit.
If you’d like to read a little about the way that he worked with the sector, we’d recommend Clive Parkinson’s blog, published over the weekend. And to know more about his life and career please read this statement from the National Centre for Creative Health.