Organisations of Hope: Building a Creative Consortium for Health Equity in Greater Manchester
This research project was led Dr Simon Parry, Senior Lecturer in Drama and Arts Management at the University of Manchester, as part of Creative Manchester. Full information about all aspects of this research project can be found here.
What were we trying to do?
This research project aimed to build a creative health coalition - which is a diverse group of organisations and individuals representing communities, cultural organisations, charities, and local government – to work together to find out how existing community assets could be used to improve health and wellbeing and increase equity, and reduce health-related inequalities.
To build the creative health coalition, we needed to know what creative health assets were currently available in Greater Manchester and where they were located.
Creative health assets include things like parks, dance clubs, choirs and community centres – any venues and groups that community members can access that benefit their health and wellbeing.
By increasing knowledge of creative health assets, we could see whether they were spread across Greater Manchester fairly and examine whether people were able to find and access them. Increased knowledge would also mean we could find ways of replicating successful creative health assets in areas that would benefit the most.
Developing the creative health coalition was intended to reinforce Greater Manchester’s belief that creative and cultural activities can have a positive impact on mental health and wellbeing. Greater Manchester committed to this by becoming the world’s first creative health city region – read the strategy.
Why was this important?
Access to creative health assets is beneficial to people’s health and wellbeing. Greater Manchester has worse health outcomes than people in other parts of the UK, but improving access to creative health assets should have a positive effect on outcomes, helping to reduce health-related inequalities in the region.
How did we do it?
The aim of Organisations of Hope was to build a creative health coalition, bringing together communities and organisations to address health inequalities and inequities in Greater Manchester.
An initial mapping exercise across Greater Manchester identified the creative health assets that were available and where they were located.
A series of workshops with communities, and conversations with practitioners and stakeholders then took place. These examined the actions, systems and assets to ensure that information on creative health gets to the right people at the Greater Manchester, individual city and town levels, and on a local community level, city and local levels.
In total there were five strands to this research project on creative health in Greater Manchester:
- GM creative health mapping and consortium building
- Health inequality mapping
- Community asset hub scoping (children and young people)
- Community asset hub scoping (adult brain health)
- Outcomes and dissemination
Dr Luke Munford (Deputy Lead for Economic Sustainability) led on the 'Health Inequity Mapping' strand of this work.
Findings
The Organisation of Hope research team worked with Cartwheel Arts to understand more about communities' access to creative health activities in their local area. Findings from this were published in 'A Hopeful Day' storybook.
Visual minutes from some of the workshops held with community groups were created by artists Stacey Coughlin and Doodlher (Victoria Whitaker). They give an overview of the main findings about creative health assets and what barriers might restrict access.
A survey was done to find out understand the professional development, training and support needs of Creative Health Practitioners across Greater Manchester - see the main findings.
Who did we work with?
Project partners
Other partners/supporters
Funding information
Organisations of Hope was funded primarily by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
In 2021, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) established the £26 million Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities investment, which enabled AHRC to fund several research projects that examine how to scale-up small, local approaches to tackle health inequalities. Organisations of Hope was one of those research projects.
More information
Programme Lead
Mike Spence