Our News
Mark Meets: Arts 2 Heal
Our volunteer Mark O’Shaughnessy spent time visiting community groups across our region, meeting the leaders who are making a real difference to the lives of local people. Their insight is invaluable to our team, helping us understand their strengths, challenges and how we can do more to help.
The Charity “Arts 2 Heal” is set up for the promotion and protection of health, prioritising adults and young people with general mental health issues and those who self-harm or would self-harm. To achieve this Arts 2 Heal delivers a range of art-based interventions, addressing the needs of those who are socioeconomically deprived and typically struggle to access support.
When discussing the challenges they Arts 2 Heal face Banu highlighted:
“The biggest challenge I would say is making our voices heard. As a small charity often, we get brushed aside in favour of larger organisations who have not necessarily got the correct skills and knowledge in place.
One example is the creative approaches to teaching IT (I spoke about). For our members with complex and multiple learning difficulties. Formal education has failed them and a disproportionate amount of our beneficiaries lack basic IT skills (of all ages).
The “solution” offered was to signpost our members onto courses (formal classroom based) already delivered in the borough. My proposal for a creative approach to learning to make IT accessible has been dismissed on several occasions over the years. So I went ahead and ran a pilot using volunteer support.
The success and timing proved vital as this coincided with COVID social restrictions. Having developed basic IT skills our members were confident to jump onto our online workshops. Which we successfully launched within days of the announcement.
The small group of pilot project members went onto to teach their peers and the ripple effect that created meant more members engaged online. This is the true magic of our organisation, empowering our learners. After all anybody can teach, anybody can learn – information is at our fingertips (you’ll tire of me saying this!)”
To read more stories like this and learn how we support grassroots organisations across our region, sign up to our newsletter. If you’d like to help small charities like Arts 2 Heal continue their vital work, consider supporting the Community Foundation today.