Projects

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. 

They propose to run a range of outdoor activities for isolated BAME families in Oldham, including walks, growing food, and trips to parks. They will facilitate three participatory workshops, and explore the benefits to health and wellbeing of participating in this kind of activity. They will use different creative media to document their findings all supported by the Researcher.

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. 

They will collaboratively design and deliver a peer mentoring programme for young women affected by, or vulnerable to, child sexual exploitation, bringing them together in participatory arts workshops. The mentors will be adult survivors, trained and supported by researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University and given the opportunity to attend training on the campus as well as receive a qualification. The project will be evaluated, using participatory methods in partnership with the mentors and young women. 

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.

Derg Valley Care will collaborate on a project bringing together “Grow Your Own” and social prescribing to see if an intervention like that could alleviate both poor wellbeing and food poverty. The researcher will be involved in analysing the Social Return on Investment. They will establish the grow your own work in a rural area, and the Social Prescribing in Strabane, and aim to understand more about the different challenges between rural and urban areas. They will be collaborating with Strabane Health Improvement Project, who bring expertise around grow your own initiatives.

Informing Choices NI, together with their researcher, will co-design an educational programme that informs and supports women with learning disabilities through the menopause. They will review of existing evidence in this practice area, discuss how best to deliver a programme with stakeholders and then use this insight to co-design and pilot a programme for women in Derry & Strabane. They hope to end up with a tested programme that they can deliver across the region.

Londonderry YMCA will run 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 will support recruitment of student volunteers and facilitate some group sessions for the mentoring pairs to discuss issues which are important to them. YMCA will provide training and support for the mentors and match them with mentees who are in touch with their existing services.

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.