We’re now planning on how to bring this theory to practice with creativity being embedded throughout homelessness services on a city level, beginning in Coventry. This became the Jigsaw of Homeless Support, a model that is being embedded into the city homelessness strategies in Manchester and Coventry and is one of the UN’s examples of best practice. We also worked with colleagues in the homeless sector in Manchester to develop a visual model to demonstrate the need for a multiplicity of solutions. We commissioned a global impact review of arts and homelessness which showed that creativity builds well-being, agency, resilience and skills (Shaw, 2019). It’s this philosophy that drove us to make the case for creativity in the homelessness sector more strongly. The arts has to be included as one of those.
There are a multitude of reasons why a person becomes homeless, so there needs to be a multitude of solutions when helping someone get out of homelessness. You see, homelessness is not just about housing. The arts are reaching people more than ever before and COVID-19 is showcasing that everyone should have access to arts. But for the first time it has more value than it’s ever had. Up until now, they have always been seen as an ‘add on’ to the work that already exists within the sector. Sadly, arts within the homelessness sector have traditionally been undervalued and never really taken seriously.
Cardboard Citizens, UK initiated new arts projects.However, we found that the Homeless Arts sector stepped up during lockdown, to make sure that those facing homelessness had access to the arts: But there are always parts of society that fall through those cracks.
COCOSPACE RETURN POLICY TV
TV programmes and online arts workshops have ‘exploded’ onto our screens, making the arts accessible to as many as possible. The value of the arts has never been stronger because of COVID – overnight it became as important as medication, helping with isolation, resilience, and mental health in lockdown. We’re also passionate about co-production and half of our board and staff members are – or have been – homeless. We renew our commitment to connect and strengthen this emerging sector of arts/homelessness, helping individual projects develop and making the case for creativity to be more available in homelessness services. We were asked to repeat the event in Rio 2016 and became an independent charity in 2019, changing our name to Arts and Homelessness International this month. We created With One Voice to showcase this. As the world’s eyes fell on London that summer, people who were homeless wanted to be noticed for their skills and achievements, not their needs and problems. The project was created during the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad when I was running UK charity Streetwise Opera. Some of the 300 creative projects we know from around the world joined us and friends from Japan, Rio, Iran and UK to perform poetry, song and theatre, showing how art and creativity helps us thrive, not just survive.ĪHI brings positive changes to policy, projects and people in the homelessness sector through creativity. On 18 September, Arts and Homelessness International (AHI) launched in an environment we have grown accustomed to – Zoom. Matt Peacock and David Tovey from Arts and Homelessness International talk about the importance of creativity in the homelessness ecology and of working with people not for them. Positive change to homelessness sector through creativity by Matt Peacock & David Tovey
0 kommentar(er)
