Building resilience through community arts practice: A scoping study with disabled young people and young people facing mental health challenges

This research project explores how community visual arts practice can help young people flourish and connect with their communities despite adverse experiences they may have faced. The research focuses on socially excluded young people with disabilities and young people facing mental health challenges. It has included young people and other community partners in all stages of its design and they have contributed to writing the bid, particularly the collaborative arts activities statement. Young people and other community partners will also be fully involved in its delivery, building on previous collaborative research conducted and showcased on the community website boingboing.org.uk. The main body of this project involves a review of existing research data relating to these issues, drawing on the academic literature in the fields of resilience research, disablity studies, arts for health practice and geographies of health and impairment, and on what is known as 'grey literature' housed on community and policy websites.

Expert advisory panel members' views will inform the framework for the literature review. There will also be an interim workshop with community arts practitioners and academics in order to report preliminary findings and pool existing knowledge; and case studies of planned visual arts interventions by community partners, focusing on disabled young people and young people with mental health challenges. The research will be conducted by an international interdisciplinary team of academics with expertise in the fields of disability arts, social exclusion, community health and resilience. These academics will work alongside resilience-focused and community arts organizations in the South East of England and community arts practitioners interested in enhancing the effectiveness of their arts practice. Impacts of the project will include: improving community arts practitioner and academic understandings of the links between arts practice, resilience and resilient communities; improving the lives of young people with mental health complexities and young people with moderate learning disabilities through the provision of community visual arts workshops targeted at fostering resilience; raising awareness of the creativity and talent of young disabled people (including their own interpretations of resilience) through a public exhibition of their art work and enhancing the effectiveness of future community arts for resilience interventions through the development of best practice 'visual arts for resilience' resources including a film.

This project brings multiple impacts which extend well beyound a narrowly concieved academic community. Project beneficiaries include, young (dis)abled people and their communities through participation in arts projects designed to foster thier resilience; arts practioners and managers who will be participating in an interim workshop designed to share resilience expertise; arts policy makers concerned with best practice in this field and the general public through an exhibition which aims to raise awareness of the creativity and talent of young, socially excluded (dis)abled people and their interpretations of resilience. Furthermore, given the community-university partnership expertise of the co-investigator this project will itself also be contributing to the emerging impact agenda, and specifically beginning to articulate how this agenda might be shaped by the Connected Communities Programme.

Specific details of impacts are outlined in detail in our Pathways to Impact attachment. However, in short, stated impacts will be achieved through links with collaborative partners who will be delivering arts based resilience interventions; an interim workshop with leading international academics in the field and relevant arts practitioners and organizations in the South East of England interested in establishing links between arts and resilience; representatives of Arts Council England who have volunteered to be on our Expert Advisory Panel and who are responsible for enhancing diversity in the arts; best practice web resources for arts practitioners interested in enhancing the effectiveness of their community arts work with young people (lodged on a dedicated resilience website which receves over 15,000 hits per annum) and an end of project exhibition in the University of Brighton's public gallery space at its Grand Parade site in central Brighton.