I’ve been thinking recently about how healthcare and ‘the arts’ can be encouraged to feed more symbiotyically.
There has been a strong push recently in the UK to encourage performing and visual arts to engage more broadly with the themes of care, the body, medical ethics and mental health.
Part of this has come through the breakdown of the traditional models of funding (National, Regional, Local Council) and a reliance on charitable funding models (Lottery funding, Arts Council, Creative Europe) as well as individual foundations. One of these, The Wellcome Trust (Grant funding schemes and guidance | Grant funding | Wellcome) funds areas of the arts that reach into public engagement and arts fields as ways of improving health.
I wondered if there was an opportunity for Edgeryders to develop a grant that brought together the OpenCare strand with those of us on the cultural side (not that we’re really that separate) as a way of developing something (perhaps a offline public engagement project) that can feed into the strands being developed around mental health improvement.
There are certainly studies that show that engagement with the arts have a sustained and positive benefit on all aspects of mental health, and i’ve also seen brilliant theatre work that works across a variety of disciplines.
There are a few platforms out there that allow us to engage with similarly interested parties in the field.
http://thesickofthefringe.com/ - provides a platform for finding new work that supports companies developing and showcase work in this area. I’m in Edinburgh during the festivals this summer, so i would be able to start a dialogue with them and see if they were interested in encouraging people to feed into an ER project.
It’s all flimsy thought stuff at the moment, but i thought i’d share.
I assume you mean “Edgeryders [should] develop a grant application that brought together the OpenCare strand with those of us on the cultural side”, right? Like, apply to the Wellcome Trust or similar?
It makes a ton of sense. As so many things in Edgeryders, it needs somebody in the lead. Would you be prepared to lead?
Yes, an application would make more sense. I wouldn’t expect Edgeryders to actually create the grant themselves.
I would be happy to take the lead on developing an application that fits this purpose.
We would want to have a discussion about how we might approach this process, and what we would want a successful outcome to be, but otherwise i’m happy to use my time and energy to start this process.
The trick is build an application where the alliance between you, as an artist, and Edgeryders, as deliverer of OpenCare, has added value for the funding agency. I see plenty of potential to do that. I am available myself, but probably @Nadia is the person most on top, who knows most about the stuff that will happen starting in the fall around OpenCare.
I’ve started looking at the posibilities through the Wellcome trust. There’s an expectation that work will work mostly with UK/ROI partners and collaborators, and be made mostly for audiences in those countries. That doesn’t preclude the integration of partners/audiences from further afield so i think there’s a strong opportunity to pull in Edgeryders from around the OpenCare community if they’re interested.
My initial thought is that i would want to wait til Friday to find out the result of the ECoC bid from Galway, but i will start to think about other possible projects that fit into the OpenCare framework and interest me from an artistic perspective.
Perhaps i should have a conversation with @Nadia and @Noemi early next week when i’ve gotmy thoughts in order
Firstly, huge congratulations for the success. I hope you are celebrating tonight.
I won’t expect a replay til later in the weekend whilst you recover from the celebrations, but i’d be really keen to touch base with you in the next few days about what you are going to do next and how i might be able to graft some of my ideas around that.
I’ve done quite a lot of work on Wellcome funded sci-arts projects, or directly for the Wellcome Trust. A couple of thoughts about what would work with them. They would want to see collaboration with scientists/academics to explore new/innovative areas of connection. If it engages with practitioners in mental health/arts therapy, there would need to be a strong theoretical and experimental element. In terms of what they support, they veer more to the neuroscience & pharma end of (mental) health research, than the social/cultural therapeutic end. If OpenCare is seen as challenging Big Pharma, it might be a little anathema to Wellcome. But I don’t know, it’s worth exploring.
I was browsing some formerly funded projects and for example in this call for Collaborative Awards in Humanities and Social Sciences it appears that they do fund community inquiries. Of course, we need to scan the calls thoroughly.
@Alex_Levene I can think of a few more edgeryders whom we can invite to be part of this, the only thing is we need to do the groundwork ourselves. On the fabulousness side, the universe is bent on us making a leap with our culture team… THIS. #wingalway 2020!
@Bridget_McKenzie are you saying you are interested in working with us on this? @Alex_Levene : I can vouch for Bridget. She participated in the original Edgeryders exercise, and she impressed us all with her smarts and compassion.
…I could be. We could help with the ‘story of change’ for an application, and audience outreach and evaluation elements. And as you know I’m interested in thrivability, which is basically about seeing mental health in a very holistic way including environmental and physical, social and cultural dimensions.
Great! This is getting stronger and stronger. Also, now that Galway won the title of ECOC 2020, it becomes a natural point to anchor some of these activities, in, via @Thom_Stewart and his group. I expect the ramp up to 2020 will be slow, despite best intentions, because the city will first need to build a delivery structure and that will take months, if not a full year. So, best to look elsewhere (like WellCome) for seed grants, involving the Galwegian contingent from the get-go.
Also: @Nadia will soon be announcing another pretty awesome (if totally crazy) opportunity: a decentralized bid to 100 and change, a competition that awards 100 million dollars to a group with a credible take on solving some big problem. “Decentralized” means that we will be proposing a smart swarm of initiatives around the central concept of community driven care. Both Galway and Flow (Bridget’s company) could be part of that. Nadia and Noemi are putting the finishing touches to the process, which needs to be robust to accommodate many people and orgs.
Thanks for your insight. Having someone who has engaged with the funded before would be really helpful when i comes to opening a dialogue with the organisation. I really appreciate the thoughts you’ve shared here.
I think right now that the strength of the work i’d want to develop would be around the social/cultural therapy end. I have an early stages crazy idea that i’d like to use a platform like Edgeryders to encourage engagement and story sharing from people working in the tech/online communities (often, but not exclusively, young socially disengaged men with a disproportiately high risk of mental health disorder and often lacking in social support networks). My idea is currently that these stories, poems and thoughts could then be collated and presented through an number of ways, but my favourite (right now) would be to create an app that uses the same technology as the Pokemon Go system. Allowing these poems or stories to be placed into a real landscape (perhaps one that the writer identifies strongly with). People can then download the apps for free and engage with the works outside. Encouraging people to share, to go outside and see their words, but also to see others engaging positively with difficult truths in an anonymous way.
As an idea/project, it’s right at the egde of my abilities but i think it might have enough edges of interest that might draw in other ER people if we can find a way of funding their work to develop the tech/care sides.
Super early days right now, but i think there’s a bare bones idea in there somewhere that has real value.
I’m not in Europe, so have little to offer there, but I am also in the (very) early stages of an arts/culture/therapy/social justice project here in the San Francisco Bay area, so am interested in listening in, offering my own experience, etc. I teach theatre (along with running The WELL-- I’m here because John Coate told me about Edgeryders-- and follow a lot of people around the world doing cool stuff with arts + healing.
As a related aside, my spouse is a local historian working on neighborhood levels and has been working on archiving (& making publicly available) an enormous photo collection, and is looking at ways to share that as a way of doing enhanced map-based walking tours, etc. (The old photos and crowd-sourced info about them could show up while you were exploring a neighborhood-- there are some things like this already, like historypin.) Not as fancy schmancy as the Pokemon Go technology, but a way to be location-based.
@brady I am personally a fan of “analog” location based. Your point reminds me a bit of the Walking Ethnographies in the alcyon days of unMonastery Matera. But hey, this is just me cheering you guys on from the sidelines, this will be whatever Alex and the team that assembles behind it (hopefully including you too) make it to be. The Edgeryders mantra is “who does the work calls the shots”.
By the way: welcome! Any friend of @johncoate is our friend. If you get the time and inspiration for it, it would be nice for you to present yourself in the Arrivals group.
OK, interesting. Young men are an important focus in general, I think. They have comparatively higher tendencies to addiction, aggression to self and others, and ideological narrowness. What do you think is the potential of transfering your idea to other communities of young men (i.e. not working in tech/online communities)? I’m thinking about those likely to be vulnerable to extremist ideologies, or drugs, or other obsessions that strip away capacity and agency.
