Flourishing: arts, health and wellbeing
I am a PhD student at the University of Derby, researching Art for Health in Older Age. My research interests include investigating ‘meaningful’ creative engagement; examining definitions of older age and wellbeing; and considering the language used around such terms, within the creative ageing movement and arts in health discourse. It was great to be at the Flourishing Lives Conference earlier this year and be involved in the discussions around ‘what is wellbeing?’.
'Many Old Hands Make Great Work'
Last week I took part in Creativity and Wellbeing Week curating an exhibition of pottery called 'Many Old Hands Make Great Work'. It showcased the talents of my pottery students who I teach from 4 residential and care homes in London and Surrey; they are all aged between 60-105 years old.
Flourishing Lives Conference 2017
The inaugural Flourishing Lives conference took place at the Royal Society in London on the 25th of May 2017. The event brought together 100 social innovators from across the arts and health sectors seeking to transform service provision, inspire progress and reduce loneliness and isolation amongst people over the age of 55.
Hello! Perhaps not the most usual way of starting a blog but certainly one of the most common greetings used in countries with English as a first language. Hello, an alteration from hallo, hollo comes from the Old High German, halâ, holâ.
For Valentine’s Day this year Flourishing Lives had the absolute pleasure of heading along to Stratford Circus for their ‘Sing Your Hearts Out’ sing-along. The first half of the sing-along was led by the Age Well Singers and the second half by Newham Super Choir.
Ah Christmas, a time for children, grandparents and cute animals. Or so the £5.6billion spent in the UK on advertising and marketing would have us believe. However, whilst children play a diverse range of characters over the course of the year in the world of advertising, it seems that older people undergo a transformation on midnight of the 30th November. [Read more...]
As part of Southbank Centre’s 'Being a Man' festival, the Royal Festival Hall played temporary host to a series of ‘Men’s Sheds’ from across London, offering free workshops and skill demonstrations accessible to all. [Read more...]
Very often in this sector we are required to ‘measure people’s happiness,’ to quantify the change in them as a result of their engagement with our work. However, while we can feel the development through their changed tone of voice, or their smile or the shift towards more proactive communications, capturing this in numerical terms can be incredibly challenging. [Read more...]
The 11th Annual Better Club Games saw 750 over 55-year-olds from across London take part in a spectacular celebration of the social and physical benefits of sport. Team Greenwich clinched gold at the event which was held in the Copper Box Arena on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford on Friday 11 November [Read more...]