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Stepping Stones Arts
In May 2006, Borderland Voices launched Stepping Stones Arts,
an innovative Arts on Referral project. Working in partnership
with the local health care community we offer a range of
creative arts activities for the benefit of referred clients
and aim to promote a wider understanding of the benefits of
arts activities for mental well-being.
The Stepping Stones Arts project is inspired, in part, by the
successful Exercise on Referral schemes, such as Healthy
Walks, which have been running in the Moorlands and other
parts of North Staffordshire for some years. Borderland Voices
believes that involvement in the creative arts, within the
context of a supportive group, can be just as effective as
exercise in the first steps on the road to recovery. The
Stepping Stones Arts strand of our work is designed to extend the
range of our existing arts provision, to gather evidence of
its benefits to referred clients and to spread the word to the
wider community.
The project will be centred at our new base at Haregate, Leek
and is due to run for at least one year from May 2006. We have
been successful in securing initial funding from ACE West
Midlands, The Big Lottery Fund, Staffordshire County Arts and
Staffordshire Moorlands District Council.
Borderland Voices will be working in partnership with primary
and secondary care trusts, GPs, community psychiatric nurses,
social services, psychiatric resource centres, healthy living
networks and the healthcare community in general. We have
already received strong messages of support from many quarters
and very much look forward to new collaborations.
We’d be pleased to hear from any one else who’s already
involved or might wish to contribute to this kind of venture.
If successful, we could well create a model of good practice
which could be 'rolled out' regionally or even nationally. For
further details or expressions of support, do please contact
us.
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