NESTA

National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA)

National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA)

Background to NESTA

Created in 1998, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), works to transform the UK's capacity for innovation. We have endowed funds of over £300 million and use them to work across all stages of the innovation process, learning about how innovation works, funding new ventures, building and delivering innovation programmes and disseminating what we've learned nationally and internationally.

Introduction

In building an evidence base for the value of interventions of arts into health it is important to establish some common ground on which comparative qualitative studies may be developed. This article relates to recent research I have carried out into community-based arts in health through a fellowship award from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and Arts (NESTA). I am looking at this area of work increasingly in an international context and this is reflected in comparative case studies I have chosen from South Africa and England. They illustrate how developing community engagement in health issues through participatory arts can stimulate self-determined individual lifestyle change and also provide social, educational and economic benefits. In recent years there has been considerable expansion and diversity in arts in health practice in the UK, and I believe this growth is not solely attributable to effective advocacy from the arts sector, but rather to an improving context for dialogue between the health sector and arts services. Some projects may focus on the therapeutic benefits of the arts, some on environmental improvements to support health staff in delivering their care services, and others look at producing more creative kinds of health information. When doing arts in health work with communities, projects may also celebrate social cohesion and identity around a health theme. These are arts projects that start from the point of using creativity to enhance social relationships, reflecting growing evidence that good relationships and social status are major determinants of health. Such diversity is also making it possible to identify a wide range of potential benefits.

Community Arts and Public Health

My own interest in community-based arts in health originated many years ago in reading Michael Wilson's book Health Is For People, in which he set out the agenda for a new public health movement anchored in culture: 'Factors which make for health are concerned with a sense of personal and social identity, human worth, communication, participation in the making of political decisions, celebration and responsibility. The language of science alone is insufficient to describe health; the languages of story, myth and poetry also disclose its truth.' I could see from my experience of managing participatory arts projects how those supplementary languages that Wilson refers to could be expressed in all art forms and across cultures. I was also impressed by Wilson's pragmatism in observing that: 'It is difficult to describe what we mean by well-being without asking the question: What is health for?' I think researchers first need to understand better the processes of ...