Sharing Learning

Deepness will work with partners across the Western Isles and with three researchers to explore the impact of participation in creative activities on experiences of agency, autonomy and mental wellbeing for people with a lived experience of dementia and their unpaid supporters. Participants in the project will work in group or individual creative disciplines to explore and document their dementia stories auto-ethnographically. The researchers will collaborate with Deepness, arts centres, and facilitators to support peer researchers as they participate in the arts activities. Disciplines include but are not restricted to music, movement, dance, crafting, painting, poetry, printing, sculpting and multi-media installations and will vary across creative venues. Project participants will be split into two groups – the Peer Researcher Group and the Arts Participant Group. Both groups will come together for the final inter-generational festival of dementia arts and mental wellbeing.

Men Behaving Dadly and their researcher will explore the role of play in relation to the mental wellbeing of Dads in Oldham, by training community researchers to explore the question with dads in a range of community locations. They want to understand how they can maximise the impact on children's lives, promoting positive mental wellbeing and prevention of poor mental health. They will train members of the group in research methods, design the research collaboratively and the dads asking questions. They will use arts methods to help capture the findings, and share these in a dissemination event. 

OAK Community Development is a group in Oldham that has been working with the BAME community there for over 20 years. Their Ideas Fund project, “Families Growing Together” was funded to bring South Asian residents closer to nature to help improve their mental health and wellbeing while promoting socialization amongst themselves through gardening sessions and learning workshops.
Through an extension grant, they continue to work closely with their researcher, Dr Rajeeb Sah from the University of Huddersfield to create and produce a Wellbeing & Skills Journal that can be used to record and track the learning and progress of participants journey and explore research questions around mental health and wellbeing within the BAME community.

Air Athletics, a grassroots cheerleading and dance club, will collaborate with their researcher, an experienced mentor and former elite athlete, to run sessions for young people and parents exploring experiences around wellbeing and competition. They will feed their experiences into a performance piece which will be developed with input from the whole group, and the process will be captured through film. The researcher will be working alongside the group, co-designing a series of workshops to help them understand more about their experience of competition and build skills. 

Keeping Our Girls Safe (KOGS) in Oldham received funding from the Ideas Fund in the first phase to collaborate with researchers from Manchester Met University. Their project aims at developing and delivering a programme of peer mentoring, where young women affected by sexual exploitation were mentored by older women with lived experience of the same issues.
Recently awarded an extension, KOGS continues to deliver the peer mentoring programme and are also working to develop and pilot a practitioner training programme on Child Sexual Exploitation (CSE) and develop a CSE screening tool. They will develop all of these collaboratively with the women who engage in KOGS support/peer mentoring programmes.

They plan to run a series of 8 workshops with South Asian women, exploring identity through the process of craft making, using different materials. The emphasis will be on process, not production and giving women time to experiment creatively, explore their identities and validate their choices. The researcher will help the women construct the stories of self, and share their skills with each other.

With support from their researcher, the StrongHer Together group will co-create a community research project, identifying topics and running a series of research events for local women. They will then use creative methods such as podcasting to draw together the insights from the research.

Working across both rural and urban parts of the Derry and Strabane area, Derg Valley Care received funding to work in partnership with Dr Ben Fitzpatrick(Ulster University) to establish if a social prescribing (SP) service combined with Grow Your Own type initiatives could effectively target both the issue of food poverty and improved mental wellbeing. They are also in partnership with the Strabane Health Improvement Project.

Located in Northwest Northern Ireland, Informing Choices NI is focused on starting up menopause groups in various organisations and communities and creating safe spaces where women with learning disabilities and those without could come together to have informal chats and education sessions, start the conversations needed to help them and to support each other. Currently in their extension, they are developing a training programme on supporting women through the menopause for support /care professionals across Derry and Strabane in collaboration with the participant group from the first phase and their research partner, Dr Claire McFeeters from Ulster University.

“My relationship with the university has been going from strength to strength. Ulster University held their first ever Inter Professional Education festival recently and I was asked to facilitate workshops. Over the years I have tried to reach out to the university and initial conversations were good but nothing ever came from it.”~ Project Lead.

Londonderry YMCA ran a mentoring project for 15 girls aged 11-14 who access their services, pairing them with student mentors from Ulster University Social Work and Community Art department. The researchers facilitated some group sessions for the mentoring pairs to discuss issues which are important to them. YMCA provided training and support for the mentors and matched them with mentees. This project has now ended.

ARC Fitness will create gender-specific recovery groups, and understand the wellbeing benefits/outcomes based on participation in a gender-specific or mixed group. Researchers will help upskill “research champions” at ARC, and they will share their findings at a community/university dissemination event.