Great Place Greater Manchester

The Great Place GM programme aims to demonstrate the powerful contribution of culture and creativity to health and wellbeing, community, inclusion and place. The project was part of the national Great Place Scheme funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England, and delivered over three years by Greater Manchester Combined Authority.

The programme investigated four themes which emerged after an intensive period of partnership development. Creative Ageing explored what it takes to support a thriving, creative ageing ecosystem while No One Left Out focussed on the civic role of cultural organisations and how a focus on values can transform the way we think about access, inclusion and community.

Our Place looked at the relationship between place shaping, wellbeing and creativity and the final theme, Culture Health and Wellbeing aimed to build on more than a century of creative health practice in our city region towards an embedded and sustainable approach to creative health.

But what did we achieve? Three years feels like enough time to make an impact, but it has passed in the blink of an eye and with that big, nasty dark shadow that has been Covid right in the middle of it. But we have achieved, just not necessarily what we thought we would.

Achievements aren’t always visible

We learnt, and the system learnt. And what the system learnt has become embedded and won’t run the risk of being lost as individuals move on. We learnt that partnerships start with listening and with open, considered and often slow conversations. Real change takes time and our schedules and funding cycles should be a planning framework, not a straightjacket.

It would have been easy not to progress our partnership with Street Games and not to collaborate on a youth social prescribing pilot in eight GM colleges, because this all happened in the last six months of Great Place. There was no time.

But we’ve found a way to progress this work and to articulate the partnership with Street Games, the network of colleges and the opportunities it is bringing to Greater Manchester as the outcome. Especially now, funders are open to discussion about what it takes to make things happen and what we achieve isn’t always visible to the outside or counted with participant numbers.

Drawing parallels

Working through Covid exercised our abilities to adapt and respond to changing and often quite frightening circumstances. How do you deliver five residencies in five extra care schemes with five housing associations and housing staff who are worried about the health of their residents? You take their lead, and you don’t dismiss culture and creativity as something that isn’t important to anyone else.

There is no better example than one film made with Bill, the resident of an extra care scheme as the result of one of these residencies. We stopped worrying about numbers and postcodes and focused instead on what would make the most difference. And it turned out to be the creative relationship that grew by phone between Bill and the artist in residence.

Their film, Lifesolation is a beautiful exploration and record of what it is like to live through a pandemic, feel alone but not lonely and draws important parallels between the Covid pandemic and the Aids pandemic of the 1980s. The film has been seen by hundreds online and is being used by Housing Associations and the LGBT Foundation to raise awareness of the invisibility of older people as tenants, particularly in extra care schemes.

What did we learn about community and place?

Covid has seen people working together across all manner of boundaries, and at scale, to problem solve in their local neighbourhoods. Culture and creativity has been an important tool in this movement for community action.

Our funders were happy for us to repurpose funds for the Creative Care Kits project which meant we were able to convene 60 voluntary, community and cultural sector organisations to demonstrate the essential role of creativity to health and wellbeing. We worked with 300 volunteers, the fire service, community response hubs and the private sector to develop, make, assemble and distribute 53,000 Creative Care Kits to young and older people who were isolated and digitally excluded during the lockdowns of 2020.

We know that the kits were useful, but what we didn’t anticipate were the enormous befits felt by the organisations and individuals who took part. Arts organisations talked about how the project gave them a way to keep working with groups; freelance artists were able to earn some money by developing content; and volunteers talked about the benefits to their mental health. New relationships were formed between creative organisations and community and voluntary groups, and we saw, in real time, the power of creativity to make a difference to people’s lives.

Social glue

Covid was certainly an unwelcome disruptor, but it also pushed us faster and better to develop relationships, practice and learning crossing demographic and thematic boundaries, challenging how we think about co-production with communities and between organisations and institutions.

The 16 projects that made up Great Place GM are the building blocks for what we do next – none more so than A Social Glue. This publication, which is neither report nor road map, by Dr Clive Parkinson, is the result of 12 months research with communities, organisations and artists across Greater Manchester into the potential for creativity and culture to change lives.

Building on findings from Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On (2020) and the Report of the Greater Manchester Inequalities Commission (2021), it lays the groundwork for Greater Manchester to become the world’s first Creative Health City Region, where, by 2024, heritage, culture and the arts will play a key part in the health and wellbeing of its diverse residents and workforce.

How to create a sustainable cultural ecosystem?

This ambitious plan will be supported by learning from other Great Place projects including a youth social prescribing pilot in colleges, the development of an arts evaluation kit for use in children and young people’s mental health settings and establishing community-based arts and health partnerships through Live Well Make Art.

So how do we create an ecosystem where culture and creativity are understood as a natural, necessary and sustainable part of our nation’s approach to health and wellbeing? We have a unique opportunity in Greater Manchester with the formation of a new Integrated Care System, to really think about and do things differently.

I have recently taken up a secondment to the GM Health and Social Care Partnership where I am lead for Creative Health and for children and young people’s social prescribing. This gives me the chance to work with colleagues from across the fields of health and social care, with GPs, with artists, with funders, thinkers, voluntary sector organisations as well as a network of similarly minded people across England to make change happen.

Julie McCarthy was Great Place GM programme manager at GMCA. She is currently seconded to GM Health and Social Care Partnership as lead for Creative Health and CYP Social Prescribing.

@GM_Culture | @artymccarthy