Mapping of Initiatives on Culture, Health and Well-being

The project was set up with and within the Vilnius University Hospital Santariškės Clinic. The activities of the project as well as the project benefits, its scope, implementation period or the group size of participants were defined together with the representatives of the management of the partner organization. The aim of the project was to increase the social activity of the staff, strengthen their self-esteem, acquire new skills and abilities and lastly, increase the availability of art in surroundings where people are not accustomed to it.

Art Testers is the largest culture education program in Finland, offering all eighth-graders (ages 13 to 14) and their teachers 1–2 annual visits in esteemed cultural institutions. Annually, the program reaches over 65,000 people in all Finnish municipalities. The visits are part of schoolwork and therefore offered equally to every eighth-grader in Finland - regardless of their socio-economic background, place of residence, special needs, wealth of their municipality, or their teacher’s interests.
The core goal of the Art Testers concept is to offer young people equal, accessible, and unforgettable experiences in art and to find them tools to form well-versed opinions on their experience. What did they think? Would they revisit? After the visit, the students are asked to review their art experience with a browser-based app. The reviews are then published on the Art Testers website for everyone to see.
The visits are accompanied with pedagogic materials provided by the art institutions. These pre- and post-visit materials include information about the event, the particular art form, and the individual artists behind the work. All this makes it easier for young people to approach art and enjoy the visits, even if the art forms and their traditions were completely new to them.
At the art visits, the students learn many skills that will be important for them in the future, such as critical thinking, perspective taking, self-expression, empathy, and interaction with others. The experiences can also provoke the eighth-graders to reflect on the concepts of right and wrong, virtues and values, or what constitutes a good life.

How can a cultural intervention be embedded in the setting of a care organisation for older people? That is what the initiators are trying to find out in this international research project. Through participatory action research with clowns, family members, care staff and management of care organisations, they investigate the dynamics of the way in which all these actors play a part in providing good care for people with dementia.

Galerie ART CRU Berlin is Berlin’s first and only non-profit gallery for outsider art, which was established in 2008.
Located in the middle of the vibrant Berlin art scene, the gallery conducts four main exhibitions annually presenting artworks produced by artists suffering from mental illness or mental disabilities. Those exhibitions take an essential position in the contemporary art scene and aim to stimulate an active discourse with the public and the established art world. They promote social inclusion and reduce stigma. Furthermore, the gallery team is convinced that showing these highly creative and authentic artworks promotes the (mental) well-being of both the artists and the visitors.
Galerie ART CRU Berlin is backed by the association PS-Art e.V. Berlin, a network of various psychosocial institutions.

This is an initiative created 7 years ago. The organisers designed Artful Retreats, based on art therapy principles, to introduce Arts for Health in the popular field of wellness and well-being retreats. The objective of these retreats are to support participants' mental health well-being with the use of different modalities of art. Although Artful Retreats have a niche exclusive audience today, it is an initiative active in communication through which manages to broaden Arts for Health awareness. The format of the retreats are filled with creative interventions and are 4 to 6 consecutive days long. Participants often describe their experience in the retreats insightful, gaining a better understanding of their inner world, appreciating new tools to cope with stress and anxiety while reporting lasting behavioural benefits long after the completion of the retreats. The organisers are actively seeking ways creating events which can reach broader audiences. Their on-line and in person events have participants from all over the world. Artful Retreats is a collaboration between Penelope Orfanoudaki and Romny Vandoros and work in Switzerland, Greece and Australia.

Integrated dance workshops designed for the women Mental Health users of the Centers Day Hospital. The organizers propose dance and movement workshops as a regular physical activity with the added value that dance expresses emotions and communicates with others through movement, so it will bring mental well-being that will contribute to improving the quality of life of these women by offering them this safe space for communication and creativity.
The aim of this project is to offer a creative space within the center's therapeutic programs, which allows users to achieve a certain degree of autonomy and stability, through supervised and measured dynamics, rehabilitating personal capacities and social skills to regain self-esteem. The organizers will encourage group participation and facilitate interpersonal relationships to get out of isolation and reinsert into the community through a community artistic practice such as dance.
Parameters to measure:
Self esteem: to measure self-esteem, the Spanish version validated by Vázquez, Jiménez and Vázquez (2004) of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (1965) will be used. This scale is composed of 10 items related to feelings of self-esteem and personal value in a balanced way, that is, it consists of 5 positive and 5 negative items. (Example: "I really feel worthless sometimes" or "I think I have a lot to be proud of.") Responses are scored on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree).
Emotional intelligence. Regarding emotional intelligence, we will use the 360º assessment (Extrema and Fernández Berrocal, 2003) using only the self-perception questionnaire. As Bisquerra, Martínez, Obiols and Pérez (2006) point out, this allows the self-perception of each user to be discovered in relation to different emotional skills, making each one aware of their own progress and reflecting on those emotional skills they need to continue developing. The questionnaire consists of 14 items that assess emotional competences by assigning values ​​from 0 to 10. Some examples of items that can be found are "I know how to express my emotions appropriately" or "I control my impulsivity".
Satisfaction with life: to measure satisfaction with life, we will use the Spanish version (Atienza, Pons, Balaguer, and García-Merita, 2000) of the Life Satisfaction Scale by Diener, Emmons, Larsen, and Griffin (1985), which measures satisfaction with life as a cognitive judgment process, through 5 items. The answers will be scored on a Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). An example item is "In most ways my life is the way I want it to be."

Within the framework of the EU program Erasmus+, the strategic partnership Creative Ageing dealt with the topic of cultural participation opportunities for seniors in difficult circumstances.
How can barriers to participation be overcome for this target group? How can low-threshold access be created? What strategies are needed for change? Staff from the city councils of Munich, Berlin (DE), Brighton & Hove (UK), Ostend (BE), Gothenburg (SE) and Leeuwarden (NL) will share their local strategies, research and good practice together with arts education practitioners.
Cultural education is an indispensable part of general education and lifelong learning. It can enable people from childhood to older age to develop their creative and personal potential, actively shape society and experience community. Cultural participation fights social isolation and promotes health and well-being as well as social cohesion.
It is therefore no surprise, that, in view of increased life expectancy and demographic change, cultural education is increasingly being discovered throughout Europe also for people of older age. Not only in culture and education, but also in the fields of leisure, health and care, as the strategic partnership shows. This field of »cultural geragogy« is still quite young, and yet numerous studies show that cultural education of older people and seniors make an immense contribution to quality of life, health and well-being. In 2019, WHO published over 3,000 evidence-based studies verifying this effect.
From the very beginning the project group was convinced that in order to reach out to the target group and actively involve them in cultural projects, it is necessary to work together across sectors and gain mutual knowledge of potentials and needs in administrative structures and methodological practices. In transnational meetings, the partner cities presented their cultural and social projects, funding programs and research results to each other; they experienced practical workshops together and exchanged ideas with the target group.
Following the project, the challenge for each of the partners involved is to figure out how to transfer and use what they have learned. The project group will continue to discuss and network beyond the project duration from 2023.

Art Therapy Association have developed dance and breathing and relaxation classes that aim to: calming the mind, focusing on being in the here and now, relaxation, and thus calming the body, releasing stress, improving the quality of sleep, adding energy
They offer this for everyone, especially for people who are more stressed, for people who suffer from anxiety, depression, for people open to development, taking care of their body and mind, and for people who want to experience something new in order to find relaxation in body and mind.

Association for therapeutic tango in Asturias is a group of professionals who use Argentine tango as a tool to promote physical and mental health. They focus on the particularities offered by this music and this dance to work on three different levels: physical, social and emotional. They have already started working with people with Parkinson's but they want to reach more people and they want to do it professionally.

2 metres is a show that can be performed in front of the windows of a hospital (or other health facility) with a sound broadcasting in the rooms.
Three elements. Two acrobats on a Chinese pole and this oxygen, the invisible one which is everywhere in the air and yet missing in Jesse's body. With the help of Rocio, Jesse demonstrates that we don't stand on our fears, but on our dreams. He suffers from cystic fibrosis. Together, they evoke the fragility of our existence and the power of hope.
Discovering oneself, learning to help each other, to ask for help, learning to find the strength to realize oneself, so many themes approached with sincerity. A touching and generous show that allows human beings to be human.