PERFARE “PERforming arts to promote social welfARE access in Europe”

PERFARE “PERforming arts to promote social welfARE access in Europe” wants to innovate the creative models of the partners’ organisations to make Welfare services (i.e. health and well-being) an integral part of their artistic work. The project intends to facilitate the access to any performing art experiences for an elderly audience or groups with health issues. PERFARE directly addresses artists and operators of the Creative and Cultural sector and performing arts organizations in 5 different countries - namely Italy, Hungary, Portugal, Romania and Sweden. It also addresses their needs to innovate their creative models by exploring opportunities for the integration of artistic and cultural activities into the health and social care services provided by their national welfare systems. To reach these objectives, partners will be firstly involved in a capacity building process to foster their ability to work and cooperate with actors of their local welfare systems (those entitled to design and implement supporting policies/initiatives for their target groups as hospitals, mental health centres, nursing homes, etc.). To this end, partners will search and map success stories of such cooperation, they will share knowledge and capitalise tools already developed by other EU funded projects and they will participate in a tour of field visits across Europe, in order to gain a direct experience on how performing arts interventions can improve welfare services for people with health problems. Once built, the knowledge acquired at transnational level needs to be transferred into practice. To this end, the second project phase will be conceived as a real training ground where each partner will set up a cooperation/funding scheme with the stakeholders of its welfare system.
Thanks to this legally-embedded cooperation frameworks (i.e. through the signature of specific Memoranda of Understanding), calls for actions will be launched in each partner’s territory to fund artists and their innovative ideas to involve audience groups with health problems (for example artistic residences in oncologic hospital departments, arts workshops with elders and people affected by mental diseases, and so on). Finally, the selected artists will implement pilot actions that will be further evaluated by the project partners, to measure the impact achieved by the artistic interventions in supporting people with physical and/or mental health issues.