Birmingham City Council

The role of arts and culture in supporting the health and wellbeing of the citizens is well recognised by Birmingham City Council. Throughout the last year, the Birmingham City Council worked to champion their local grassroots community organisations to conduct arts, culture, and health projects specific to communities. The projects aimed for participants to become ambassadors of good health and to empower them to share knowledge with their own and other communities, allowing for active learning to occur. Projects identified a range of measures that helped with the prevention, management, and treatment of a range of different health outcomes. Furthermore, projects were delivered in wards with high levels of social and economic deprivation, helping to reduce health inequalities for the citizens within those areas. 28.9 per cent of projects were delivered in the wards that were the top 10 most deprived, while 75.6 per cent of projects were delivered in the top 20 most deprived wards. This suggests that the majority of participants were from some of the most deprived areas of Birmingham, which identifies further the impact of targeted, local, and place-based public health commissioning, specific to arts and culture.