Project Summary

The Arts and Health Project: Healthy Aging though the arts provides seniors with weekly arts workshops, each with professional artist, intern artist and seniors worker. The project aims to facilitate senior's creative contributions to their communities and at the same time to aid the ability to "age in place", to improve the participants health and strengthen their sense of well-being. It also aims to build new expertise amongst seniors’ workers and artists working with elders in professionally led arts programs.

The following centres are currently participating in the project:

Project Activities

• Community-Engaged Arts Practice: Each project provides seniors with weekly arts workshops, with professional artists and a seniors’ worker. Artists work with the seniors to develop a community-engaged arts practice where seniors explore and develop work that is important to them. Different than a classroom dynamic, a community-engaged arts practice is a working collaboration between professional artists and community members who might not have previously considered themselves to be artists. It recognizes all participants as important contributors to the collaborative group work.   This collaboration develops the skills, community spirit, and artistic sensibilities of those who participate, as producers and as audience.
• Arts Experience:Throughout the project artists organize arts experiences – from attending performances and exhibitions to viewing films and discussions with visiting artists- that will connect the work the seniors are creating with the larger creative community.
• Exhibition/Performance Opportunities for Senior Participants: A year-end showcase of all the seniors’ work, takes place annually. The project sites also organize local exhibition and performance opportunities for the seniors throughout the program year.
• Community of Practice:This initiative supports the development of new knowledge and expertise in the fields of seniors' wellness, and community-engaged arts.

The project aims to build new expertise amongst artists, seniors’ workers and other professionals and volunteers working with elders through collegial meetings and capacity building workshops, as well as on-line learning tools.

Artists from a variety of disciplines are currently working with the seniors in the development of work in the visual arts, the written word, multidisciplinary performance and digital storytelling.

View a short video on the Arts & Health Project .

Context

The Arts, Health and Seniors Project addresses many current issues for seniors and artists:

• Health practitioners across North America are recognizing the need for new models of care.
• Our population is aging and marginalization is increasing amongst the elderly.
• Current approaches to recreation are being expanded and enriched to support seniors' wellness.
• Community-engaged artists and those working with seniors seek support for their work in community partnership towards wellness through the arts.
• Research is needed to demonstrate the link between participation in the arts and health in the Canadian context.

Goals

• To maintain and/or improve the health and wellbeing of vulnerable seniors through their participation in community engaged arts practices;
• To create a supportive environment for community engaged arts practices and increase their use within health environments and centres for community programming;
• To demonstrate the positive impact of participation in arts-based activities on the health and well-being of seniors in Vancouver and the North Shore.

For more information about this project please contact:
Margaret Naylor
Arts and Health Project: Healthy Aging Through the Arts
Arts, Culture and Environmental Arts Department, Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation
margaret.naylor@vancouver.ca 604-713-1861

Funders: Vancouver Coastal Health – SMART Fund, Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation, Canada Council for the Arts, B.C. Arts Council,The Arts Office, District of North Vancouver & City of North Vancouver,

Partners:

• BCRPA - British Columbia Recreation and Parks Association
• Britannia Community Services Society
• Roundhouse Community Arts & Recreation Society
• Renfrew Park Community Association
• Renfrew Collingwood Seniors Society
• Silver Harbour Seniors Centre
• Strathcona Community Centre Association
• Qmunity - BC’s Queer Resource Centre
• Arts BC/Assembly of BC Arts Councils
• UBC School of Nursing