Up to two thirds of UK orchestras are already working in health and social care settings. With NHS support, they could be "at the heart of society’s recovery from the mental and economic scars of Covid-19".
Even with a light at the end of the lockdown tunnel, musicians' mental health is suffering due to "substantial uncertainty around how quickly the music industry can recover".
Erica Ramsay, Geraldine Montgomerie and Holly Dannhauser explore the challenges faced by a local arts in health network – and how they mirror the hurdles for this work nationally.
Underpaid artists have become caretakers for communities that commissioners want to say they’re supporting. Eleonora Belfiore asks: whose responsibility is it to push for the change we so desperately need?
The initiative will facilitate new interventions by sharing the successes of existing ones, seizing on the UK's growing appetite for creativity as a source of wellbeing.
Mandatory masks, social distancing and temperature tests make audiences feel more comfortable returning to venues - and on-the-spot testing won't change that.
Organisations and local authorities say its unfair and uneconomical to place harsher limits on cultural venues than gyms and hairdressers, as they trumpet their benefits to the nation's health.
A review highlighting shoddy employment practices and a lack of pastoral support doesn't go far enough to change the conservatoire's culture, critics say.
Would we still see the same benefits to wellbeing if we took art and culture out of ‘culture on referral’ programmes and sat people in a room together? Dr Robyn Dowlen uncovers gaps in the evidence base.
Esmée Fairbairn Foundation will be making fewer, larger grants in future and collaborating on longer term projects that have a real chance of being taken to scale. Alison Holdom explains their new strategy and what they hope to achieve.
Research into the relationship between culture, health and wellbeing could unlock an understanding of how the mental health of young people can be supported by cultural activity. Dr Robyn Dowlen talks to Anne Torreggiani about progress so far.
An ongoing and unspoken sense of crisis has driven those working in the performing arts to accept an intolerable range of behaviours as the norm. Emma Jayne Park questions the underlying structures supporting a system that requires endless resilience simply to survive.
Practitioners have seen with their own eyes how arts and health interventions can make a real difference to young people’s mental health – but can they prove it to those holding the purse strings? Katherine Taylor explains how a new evaluation framework is promising to help them do just that.
With 30 years’ experience of arts and mental health delivery, darts is very familiar with the key ingredients of an effective community-based programme for people with mental health issues. Elanor Stannage shares their progress and looks to the future.
