Mapping of Initiatives on Culture, Health and Well-being

The Cultural Prescription Project in Central Alentejo is part of Transforma - an Inclusive Culture Program for the Central Alentejo promoted by CIMAC and co-financed by the European Social Fund. It is one of the experiments the organisers want to launch in Central Alentejo, in Portugal, and they are formally working with the health care services of 8 municipalities, the cultural agents and the link workers form those municipalities, in a way they can provide the patients and citizens an experience through arts and culture to minimize mental health issues as well as other issues. The project is soon to be implemented, and it will finish by November 2023. The organisers want to plant the seeds so it can continue after this date, with the efforts of the municipalities, the primary health care units and the cultural agents of the region.

Restore project wants to tell about other possibilities of using theatre through European methodologies and approaches. Based on these premises, the project intends to promote cooperation and exchange of good practices at European level and intends to make use of the advantage of the European Union’s transparency and recognition tools to increase training opportunities and employment possibilities for professionals working in the field of Social Theatre. In particular, the specific objectives of the project are:
- to encourage the dissemination of Social and Community Theatre as an effective means of social inclusion for adults with learning difficulties
- to strengthen cooperation and facilitate the exchange of good practices in the field of informal education among the organisations taking part in the project
- to define a process of recognition and standardisation of the SOCIAL THEATRE OPERATOR profession at European Union level, a new professional figure declined in terms of knowledge, competences and skills

The main target groups of the project can be identified on different levels Non-profit organisations supporting different groups of disadvantaged adult learners working Professional adult educators and volunteers working in the field of Social and Community Theatre Groups at high risk of social exclusion and segregation such as migrants, disabled people, prisoners, ethnic minorities, former drug addicts, NEETs, etc. Artists working in the field of fragility, hardship, in contexts of social and cultural margins
The most important tangible results of the project are three Intellectual Outputs: 1) The description of the professional profile of the Social Theatre Operator according to EU standards; 2) The standardisation of Social Theatre Operator training; 3) Methodological indications for the validation, recognition and certification of the profession at national level. These three outcomes, which are closely interlinked, were promoted and disseminated through four Multiplier Events, including a major closing event in San Patrignano (Coriano, Italy), preceded by a preview in Rome. Four Joint Staff Training Events were organised in the associated countries to promote skills development and the sharing of good practices: Peer-to-Peer Learning Workshops (in Italy, Portugal and Poland) to share good practice in training and working with disadvantaged groups of adult learners; Pilot courses were organised to test and validate the training in some of the project partner countries, which were followed by a work-based learning experience, so that each student made a theatre workshop targeting different categories and groups of disadvantaged learners. A great closing event took place on 29 October 2022 at the Community of San Patrignano, one of the symbolic places of the whole project, preceded by a preview on 6 October 2022 at the University of Roma Tre, organised by Oltre le Parole onlus, leader of the European project.

The Inclusive Memory project aims at promoting the building of a common shared social memory realised through a museum based social inclusive system, through the link Art-Health-Well-being. The core idea of the project stems from the potential benefits of the cooperation between HEIs, Health and Social care Institutions and Museums, as a strategic partnership to advance in museum education as well as in museum experience in order to support the design, realization, monitoring and evaluation of art-based activities and actions specifically addressed to people with social care and health problems. The Covid 19 pandemic has brought many health systems to collapse.
The Inclusive Memory project wants to promote an innovative strategy for social inclusion, derived from the creation of a new teaching methodology, the use of digital tools and based on the development of transverse competences in both university teachers, students museum users, thus promoting well-being, health and social inclusion. The project is based on the concept which sees museums as teaching and learning environments, and Universities as active social actors, both strengthening their role of cultural integration facilitators. The Inclusive Memory project is developed as a shared process among academics, researchers, healthcare and social care, educators and museum professionals and involves different partners who already showed their interest in participating and their commitment to the project goals. The main objectives of the project are:
- the creation and the start of a new social inclusion system (especially for people with social care and health problems) based on the link Art-Health-Well-being, which can prove to be a best practice from which Health and social care institutions, cultural organizations and educational institutions from all over Europe will be able to draw inspiration;
- the design of innovative didactic paths for the promotion of social inclusion and the development of transverse skills for future museums professionals, social care givers, school teacher sand healthcare personnel based on the link Art-Health-Well-being;
- the possibility to continue organising innovative didactic paths for health and well-being promotion, also within school, health and social care institutions and museums thanks to the support of professionals who will have been properly trained on the matter, to compass and put in practice innovative art-based approaches dedicated to social inclusion.
The methodology applied in this project is based on the logic of converting the theoretical concept of Museum as inclusive spaces for Health and Well-being development into a practical protocol of teaching scenarios adapted to specific local communities needs and newly created open educational resources (the Inclusive Memory MOOC), testing the protocol and OERS into ready-to-use courses and using the test outcomes to enrich the theoretical basis.

Culture on Prescription is an Erasmus+ project that aims to prevent and combat social isolation and loneliness through art and culture. Cultural prescribing is the referral of a healthcare professional of lonely and isolated (older) people to locally available art and cultural offerings. It is a social intervention based on “social prescribing” practices, already implemented in the United Kingdom and Ireland with very positive results, and which aims to “prescribe” to participants experiences related to art, culture and social activities as a way to reduce social isolation and loneliness.
The project will introduce cultural activities facilitated by informal learning and training offers for adults. The consortium will develop and implement a study pilot in Ireland, Portugal, Romania, Germany and the Netherlands that aims to validate the Culture on Prescription intervention in these countries.

This is a project for all health professionals. From November 2021 until March 2022, 5 artists from the 289 Association in Faro, Algarve exhibited their work in the cafeteria of the Algarve University Hospital Centre. Art for Health project aims to improve the physical, mental and social well-being of the health professionals of Faro's city's hospital. The pandemic has been very hard for all, but especially for professionals in a medical environment. Art relieves emotional tension and it is used to inspire a moment of contemplation, of existential questioning that might relieve them from the stressful situation they face. The artistic interventions took place in the cafeteria, considering it is a space frequently used by the hospital's health professionals: doctors, executives, administrative staff, technicians, nurses and auxiliary staff.

The Senior Theater project took place in the municipality of Silves, in the Algarve. The initiative, conceived and implemented by technicians from the social action sector and the culture sector of the Municipality of Silves, aimed to be a complementary action to the program developed within the scope of the promotion of active ageing, which mostly included physical activities. The idea of ​​promoting theatrical activity was suggested by elements of the senior groups, who already participated in other initiatives of the Poles of Education to the Long Life of the Municipality of Silves.

PERFARE “PERforming arts to promote social welfARE access in Europe” wants to innovate the creative models of the partners’ organisations to make Welfare services (i.e. health and well-being) an integral part of their artistic work. The project intends to facilitate the access to any performing art experiences for an elderly audience or groups with health issues. PERFARE directly addresses artists and operators of the Creative and Cultural sector and performing arts organizations in 5 different countries - namely Italy, Hungary, Portugal, Romania and Sweden. It also addresses their needs to innovate their creative models by exploring opportunities for the integration of artistic and cultural activities into the health and social care services provided by their national welfare systems. To reach these objectives, partners will be firstly involved in a capacity building process to foster their ability to work and cooperate with actors of their local welfare systems (those entitled to design and implement supporting policies/initiatives for their target groups as hospitals, mental health centres, nursing homes, etc.). To this end, partners will search and map success stories of such cooperation, they will share knowledge and capitalise tools already developed by other EU funded projects and they will participate in a tour of field visits across Europe, in order to gain a direct experience on how performing arts interventions can improve welfare services for people with health problems. Once built, the knowledge acquired at transnational level needs to be transferred into practice. To this end, the second project phase will be conceived as a real training ground where each partner will set up a cooperation/funding scheme with the stakeholders of its welfare system.
Thanks to this legally-embedded cooperation frameworks (i.e. through the signature of specific Memoranda of Understanding), calls for actions will be launched in each partner’s territory to fund artists and their innovative ideas to involve audience groups with health problems (for example artistic residences in oncologic hospital departments, arts workshops with elders and people affected by mental diseases, and so on). Finally, the selected artists will implement pilot actions that will be further evaluated by the project partners, to measure the impact achieved by the artistic interventions in supporting people with physical and/or mental health issues.

Manicómio is the first art outsider studio in Portugal. Located in Lisbon at a creative cowork space, it brings together artists who have or have had mental health issues, with professionals from the creative sector and companies. Manicómio it is also a design studio (the Agencia Manicómio) in which all the creatives have suffered and suffer from mental illness. Manicómio is a 20 year-old fight for honesty, dignity and recognition of artists who are excluded by the art world simply because of their mental health history and stigma. Besides art work and exhibitions, Manicómio mentors their artists to other creative and commercial ventures, such as advertisement, illustration, jewelry and media. It is a space of human, social, financial and aesthetic dignity

For many years Valeria have been helping her mental health through the creation of “therapeutic clothing”. In the spring of 2022, she left her "serious" business in Eastern Europe and moved to Portugal to realize her dream of creating therapeutic clothing. Now she is learning to allow herself to be a creative person, creating her own small creative business and telling other people about her path.
OUT – Outdoor atelier of Clothes for Mental Health is the project proposed by Valeria in which she creates clothes for other in order to support them to express their feelings and to overcome the negative feelings. The clothes are handcrafted and created in a unique atmosphere: near the ocean, in the mountains, in the forest, on the street, usually OUTdoor places that can make the clothes more inspiring for the people.

The Exhibition Center of the Hospital Professor Doutor Fernando Fonseca (HFF) had a new exhibition, organized in partnership with the Municipality of Amadora and one of the themes of the exhibition was to raise awareness against Covid-19 through comics. The Amadora City Council intended to raise awareness of measures to prevent contagion with the Covid-19 virus and challenged a group of authors, associated with Amadora BD, to create a set of original illustrations for various billboards throughout the county. These works were based on the recommendations of the Directorate-General for Health. This initiative aimed to strengthen public health, through constant awareness of the local community. The presence of comics in the public spaces of the Municipality of Amadora was an element that facilitated the transmission of these messages addressed to the community.