CCW - Cultural Welfare Center

First training program in Italy concerning culture and health, the master Culture and Health is an executive master promoted by CCW School del CCW-Cultural Welfare Center in collaboration with DORS- Documentation Center for Health Promotion and COREP-Center for Ongoing Formation and aimed at professionals working in culture, social and healthcare fields, as well as to researchers.
In its first edition, started in December 2021 and ending in December 2022, it has involved 64 participants coming from 13 italian regions and two other nations. Participants involved are mainly women, with an average age of 41 years (more than 25% are under 40); more than half (58%) of participants come from the cultural sector, 17 persons work in social field, 8 in health field and just 1 person work in educational context.
The master has offered three training paths proposed in ideal sequence: the first devoted to building a scenario in the field according to the latest scientific researches and significant number of Italian and international best practices, the second to designing cultural welfare’s interventions and the third to designing and conducting these interventions on the filed aiming at health and social challenges. Participants could follow just the first or the second path or the whole course.
Consisting respectively in 60, 140 and 220 hours, the master has been delivered mostly online (through a weekly appointment on Zoom) but has provided in-person training moments during three weekends. Individual mentorship has been offered to the whole course’ participants, who developed an intersectoral group project work, discussed in the final graduation day.
The training proposal consisted in transmission of contents by the most influent experts in both culture and healthcare field, but also in the experimentation of different artistic practices; it has been taken in consideration and analyzed the potential for health of different cultural practices such as performing arts, visual arts, literature, music and architecture, with a particular regard to studying their impact on health at a community and systemic level.
Different training tools have been used, from frontal teaching to digital collaboration’s tools in order to make both online and in-person sessions collaborative; in particular, it has been used the slack platform to share contents, news and practices in view of developing a change-makers’ community able to operate also after the end of master.
Thanks to a great network work, the master benefits from the support of different partnerships, first of all with COREP-Centro Formazione Permanente dell’Università di Torino and DORS-Centro per la Promozione della Salute.
Social investors, such as Luigi Rovati foundation, contributed to creating a capacity building’s fund providing scholarship, making this proposal sustainable and rooted in the national territory; the overall investment exceeds 100.000 euros.