LAH received 134 applications to the commission. In the end we commissioned the following events:

1. The Purple Ladies are hoping to create a sanctuary where people with lived experience of displacement can re-connect, express themselves and collectively imagine more caring and sustainable futures.Through participatory movement, improvisation, storytelling and conversation TPL use creativity as a small act of rebellion against isolation and despair. @the.purpleladies
2. Be Manzini is an award-winning poet, trained in anatomy and physiology and Gestalt therapy, and the founder of the Newham Poetry Prize, whose practice centres the body as a site of knowledge, memory, and reclamation—particularly within marginalised communities disproportionately affected by lack of access to necessary health provision. The workshop will be an in-person poetry and embodied writing session in London for people impacted by racial injustice, gendered violence, and/or ableism, exploring “critical hope” as a lived, bodily, and evolving practice grounded in presence, articulation, and relationality in the face of uncertainty. @bemanzini @newhampoetryprize
3. MindFood will be hosting an outdoor event on Thursday 21st May at Horsenden Farm in Perivale. We will be inviting groups from local grassroots community support organisations to join us in creating a Tree of Life mural, helping participants explore a more hopeful future, and nurturing a sense of agency. The activity will encourage individuals to identify the small but achievable steps they can take to bring about positive change  @mindfood_cio
4. Homerton NHS is collaborating with Joy for Stuff and the Round Chapel Old School Rooms to run an interactive paper-recycling workshop, sharing our thoughts about the NHS going ‘paper-free’ as we turn appointment letters and information leaflets into new, beautiful and hopeful pieces of art. @joy_for_stuff @old_school_rooms @annabellemburns @nhshomerton
5. without Shape without Form, the UK’s leading spiritual art space dedicated to mind well-being and championing art for social change, invites participants to explore inner climate change, the mental and emotional conditions within us. Through shared creative practice, the workshop looks at how caring for this inner world can support change in the world around us. @withoutshapewithoutform
6. Think Cre8tive Group CIC is a Bolton-based creative health organisation using inclusive community singing to support wellbeing, confidence and connection, particularly for older adults, carers and local communities. Our event idea, Songs of Critical Hope, is a participatory singing and reflection session exploring how shared voice can help people process anxiety, uncertainty and social pressure while imagining fairer, more hopeful futures together. @thinkcre8tivegroupcic 

Read some reflections from our commissioned events below.

MindFood

Our Background

MindFood is a small mental health charity teaching food-growing and other mindful, nature-based activities to help people with anxiety, depression and some more complex disorders. We run weekly Naturally Creative nature-themed art sessions at Horsenden Farm in Ealing, and from May to October these sessions take place outdoors in our vegetable garden.

Our Prep

We invited two local community support groups to join us for our Creativity & Wellbeing event: an ESOL group from Golden Opportunities Skills & Development (GOS&D), and clients from the Umeed Day Centre. Both these Southall-based organisations do incredible work supporting people from deprived and marginalised backgrounds.

We chose the concept of the Tree of Life to share with them, feeling it fitted well with this year’s theme of Critical Hope, as it is often used as a positive psychology tool to guide reflection and inspire agency. We wanted this to be a hopeful and fruitful exercise for our art session regulars and community group guests — and we would recommend it to help anyone who has experienced feelings of hopelessness or helplessness. It also felt symbolic of MindFood’s steady, supportive approach: nurturing and growing wellbeing over time.

To prepare for the day, our regulars co-created a design for the mural and also worked on their own Tree of Life: around the roots, they detailed positive influences in their lives; for the trunk, they reflected on their strengths; in the canopy, they wrote about their hopes and dreams; and the branches represented the paths they might take to bring them closer to these.

This exercise helped shape their thinking, so they would be able to guide others on the big day. By inviting our guests to create their own Tree of Life, everyone would have a keepsake to take home, and a tangible prompt to action.

Our Day

For our day, we wanted to maintain the sense of escape that so many feel when they come to the Farm — a world away from the pressures of everyday life.

Where Critical Hope invites people to identify social issues and promote active ways to address them, we were concerned this might invite difficult and potentially distressing discussion, so we knew we needed to take things back a step or two, to something we all had in common: our mental health. Together we wanted to shine a light on difficulties around mental health (especially stigma within different communities), then reflect on personal strengths, and discuss the hopes people had for themselves and their families.

We had such a wonderful day with everyone! Bringing communities together in such beautiful natural surroundings helped put everyone at their ease. We offered homemade cakes, fresh fruit and our own herbal teas as a welcome, which made for easy conversation starters.

Many of our guests said they only knew a little English, but being in nature settled initial nerves and their confidence soon grew. The children in particular became very chatty over the course of their visit — it was lovely to see, and the mothers were thrilled!

Our regulars made a start on the mural and invited our guests to join them. There was some degree of self-consciousness around painting directly on the mural, but eventually we managed to persuade some contributors! This apparent hesitation rather surprised us at first, but we soon realised there are very few places where you can just ‘be’, and where all contributions are welcomed and celebrated. All those who participated were suitably proud of their achievement.

From the outset it was clear that for many of our guests, dedicating time to wellbeing self-care, beyond simply being in nature, was an unusual concept. We adapted our plans to make the most of the opportunity, spending more time on individual Tree of Life creations. These generated so much discussion and interest that the ESOL group decided to take the theme forward into their next lesson.

We also talked about the need for mindfulness practice to find a moment of peace, especially on the busiest days, and tried a simple technique together. Our ‘Senses 123’ exercise invited participants to look for three completely different things, listen for three noises (close by, in the middle distance, and far distance), then feel three different textures. The garden offered so many sensory elements to explore — mindfulness came naturally.

Our guests really enjoyed their visit, and were delighted too when we offered up tomato, chilli and courgette plants for them to grow at home, or share with their children’s primary schools.

  Wellbeing Impact

We asked everyone to score their wellbeing on our ‘moodometer’ at the beginning and end of their visit.

The children scored the day a full 10/10 — largely thanks to the huge number of ladybirds, snails and butterflies they counted along the way!

Mural painting continued throughout the afternoon, but there is still quite a bit to do. Our Naturally Creative regulars will continue to work on this over the summer. While we wished we had got a little further with the mural itself on the day, there was no doubt the event was a fabulous success in personal terms — we had created together and learned together, and that felt really good.

Written by MindFood.

Embodied Listening Workshop, Forest Gate

Be Manzini runs the Newham Poetry Prize

We gathered in a room at Forest Gate Library, yoga mats fanned across the floor, ambient sound threaded with poetry moving softly through the space. This is one of the most underserved and deprived boroughs in London and the country — and this is even more so for safe spaces for marginalised and oppressed communities, which this evening was centred around.

More than a workshop, it became a moment to rest, reconnect to the body, and commune through words, the heart, being witnessed, and consensual hugs where needed. During what feels like a particularly heavy time for many people and for the world, this felt not only a wanted space but a vital one, with us selling out in two days. There were tears, laughter and deep connection with the body, mind and each other.

I have always been fascinated by the relationship between music, poetry and communal healing, and the many forms that mix can take. As part of Creativity & Wellbeing Week, the Embodied Listening workshop explored how creativity can become both a form of communion and a tool for healing. My team and I witnessed people arrive carrying fatigue and tension, then leave a little lighter — with brighter smiles, softer faces, and more of a bounce in their step. Those transformations, a step or many, matter deeply.

Impact

In participants’ own words:

 Written by Be Manzini.

without Shape, without Form

I Walked Into a Room Full of Strangers on the Hottest Day of the Year. Here’s What Happened.

I almost didn’t go.

It was one of the hottest Saturdays of the year. The kind of heat where your body is basically begging you to stay indoors and do absolutely nothing. And yet there I was, making my way to a gallery on the Slough Trading Estate for a workshop I’d signed up for mostly out of curiosity and mild guilt about never doing things like this.

I went anyway. And I’m still thinking about it.

Walking in, I wasn’t sure what I’d find. And honestly? The space stopped me in my tracks before the workshop had even begun. I’ve driven past that part of the Trading Estate more times than I can count and had absolutely no idea this was there. But stepping inside felt like being transported somewhere else entirely. The kind of gallery you’d expect to find tucked down a side street in West London, all clean lines, considered lighting, and a quiet confidence and calm about it. I stood there for a moment just taking it in.

Then I noticed the room full of people and remembered I was supposed to be somewhere.

A mix of university students, people who worked on the Trading Estate, locals, non-locals, nobody knowing quite what to expect, all being very politely British about it.

The awkwardness lasted approximately ten minutes.

The workshop was called The Power of Connection and it was part of Creativity and Wellbeing Week. I’d like to tell you I showed up with deep intentions. In reality I showed up not entirely sure what I was doing there. But the afternoon had other plans.

We mirrored each other’s movements. We made noise together, actual noise, as part of what became a surprisingly moving collective orchestra of thoughts. I laughed. Properly laughed. The kind of laugh you don’t plan for on a Saturday afternoon. Something in the room loosened quite quickly, and I stopped worrying about whether I looked like I knew what I was doing.

Underneath all of it though, something quieter was taking shape.

Running through the session was something called Simran. I’ll be honest, I had no idea what it was when it was introduced. But I was curious enough to lean in rather than glaze over.

Simran is a focused practice for the mind. At its core it’s about deliberately stilling the stream of thoughts that run constantly in the background of our lives. The ones we’re so used to that we don’t notice them anymore until they’re absolutely overwhelming us.

Here’s what got me: you don’t need anything to do it. No app. No mat. No setting. You can practise it anywhere, including, as was pointed out, in the middle of a stressful work meeting when your nervous system is staging a quiet revolt and you can’t exactly announce that you’re going for a run to calm down. That felt genuinely useful rather than aspirational.

And here’s the thought I couldn’t shake for the rest of the afternoon: I spend enormous amounts of energy trying to manage what’s happening around me. If I feel anxious, I look for the source. If something feels wrong, I try to fix it. The possibility that the noise I keep trying to escape is largely coming from inside my own head, from the thoughts I’m swimming in rather than anything actually happening, was not a comfortable realisation.

But it was an honest one.

The workshop kept coming back to this: we tend to think our peace depends on what’s happening in our lives. What if it depends far more on the thoughts racings through our minds?

To finish the afternoon we made art together. Hula hoops, paintbrushes, giant markers, four collaborative pieces that somehow came out looking genuinely beautiful despite being made by a group of people who had been strangers two hours earlier. Each piece was then cut up and framed, one piece per person.

Before we took them home, we were all asked the same question:

What inner shift will you make to change the world around you?

We wrote our answers on our framed piece. Not for anyone else. Just for ourselves. A reflection and a small commitment to carry forward.

I think what without SHAPE without FORM are doing is something genuinely interesting. Art at its best makes you see something familiar in a completely new way. This workshop did that, but with your own inner world. No formulas. No pressure. Just enough space and stillness to notice what was already there.

Which, as it turns out, is quite a lot.

Even on the hottest Saturday of the year.

Written by Angie Dhatt.

Paper Hope, at Homerton Hospital

Appointment letters, medical histories, information leaflets, discharge summaries, prescriptions….if you have ever accessed healthcare, for yourself or a loved one, you will have inevitably received pages and pages of paperwork. You might have filed these records away carefully, thrown them into the recycling, stuck them to the fridge or left them on the kitchen table. They may have represented an important experience in your life or served as a tangible reminder that something significant is going to happen. They may have given you practical advice or they may have arrived late and been written in a way that confused or offended you. Whatever purpose this paperwork has served, it’s undeniable that paper is a significant part of our experience of health and care. 

So what does it mean when we remove paperwork from healthcare? Moving the NHS from analogue to digital aims to bring efficiency and better outcomes for patients, but what do we lose in this race to save time and money? Who is left behind when digitisation becomes the primary form of communication? What happens when important healthcare messages arrive in the same space as our WhatsApp messages and emails? 

At Homerton Healthcare we have been keen to consult with patients and residents about changes to the ways in which we communicate and share with our patients about the digital innovations we are implementing. Questionaries and focus groups have given us some useful feedback but creative methods can help us to explore the impacts of changes in a deeper and more thoughtful way. 

At our Paper Hope workshop we encouraged local residents and patients at the Homerton to bring along their medical paperwork and work with us to transform it into something new and beautiful. We used this physical and multi-sensory process to stimulate discussion and debate about digitisation and changes to modes of communication within the NHS. The conversations were wide-ranging and thought-provoking. The process of making new paper from old was healing in ways we did not expect. 

Local artists, Joy for Stuff have created an inclusive 5-step process for paper making, that they call Paper Jazz:

• Collecting: the joy of potential and sorting
• Shredding: the joy of destruction
• Pulping: the sensorial joy of wet pulp
• Making: the joy of creating and transforming
• Sharing: the joy of giving and sharing the stories of what you have made

At our event for Creative Health and Wellbeing Week, Homerton Healthcare patients and staff joined with the participants of a local multi-generational community group to collect, shred, pulp, make and share our medical paperwork. 

Young and old enjoyed the process of shredding, ripping and squishing paper. One participant brought a copy of his entire medical record. He had requested the records from his doctor after moving cities, acknowledging that collecting data and records of his long term illness had been significant for him. He spent a long time at the workshop mindfully and joyfully shredding his medical history. He later shared that this process had helped him to realise that he could never fully understand or control his disability, but could learn to love and accept his experiences. He was able to take home a piece of newly made paper as a symbol of this hope. 

During the workshop participants shared their experiences with the NHS app and digital appointment letters, as well as their frustrations with paper letters and outdated administrative processes. Staff members from IT and project managers implementing changes chatted together with patients and residents as they shredded, squidged and mushed the paper, learning and laughing together as they made a mess, made mistakes and formed some beautiful new creations. 

One participant spoke of the importance that a discharge summary about her daughter’s recent accident had had for her. She had kept it on her noticeboard for a long time, reading it regularly. It was a physical and tangible reminder that something important had happened and we chatted together about how an online form would not have enabled her to process the experience in the same way. Other participants shared their fears about using apps and sharing data online, and the practical challenges of having enough storage, data or a physical handset. There was positive feedback too, with some feeling that digital tools helped them to better organise their appointments and diaries and sharing that having access to letters and information online meant they were much better informed about their health. 

This was a one-off creative health workshop to celebrate Creativity and Wellbeing Week but we hope that it will be the start of more creative and imaginative activities that enable us to enrich the conversations that occur between health service and the people we work with. NHS digitisation continues to progress and it is certainly bringing positive benefits for staff and patients, but through creative activities and listening to our patients we hope that this progress does not come at the expense of human interaction and thoughtful understanding of the impacts on us all. 

Written by Annabelle Burns.

Creativity and Wellbeing Week in Bolton, May 2026

Bolton’s experience of the creativity and wellbeing week was a pivotal moment within our micro-community. As a musician-health worker team, we have seen the far-reaching effects of singing right from the start of our careers, and this is the reason that we do what we do.

When we started Think Cre8tive Group CIC, we were encouraged to explore the combination of health and creativity right from our first enquiries from our local council. We began by singing in care homes until covid, and afterwards, partnered with our local Age UK and central library to offer daytime community singing to reduce loneliness and isolation for those not in work (due to illness, age, life circumstances). So a project promoting Paolo Friere’s “critical hope” using creativity seemed perfect in Bolton’s socio-economic-political climate.

Our interpretation of critical hope was to rehearse/sing songs of positivity for 2-3 weeks, within our 3 very different and disparate groups (approximate 50 people in all) in Bolton north, central and south. All groups would then come together in a public performance in the local central library, under the alternate title: “Ac-cen-tchu-ate the Posi+ive”, after the well-known pop standard published by Arlen and Mercer in 1944.

The intention was to get the groups thinking about the ways that they actively demonstrate hope in lives that could easily be overcome by despair. In a town that values practicality and hard work, culture and creativity are often viewed as frivolous, so this seemed to be the most accessible approach.

Our usual repertoire (15-18 songs each month) focusses on well-known pop/rock/folk with country, musicals, remembrance and Christmas, too. We have found that this approach reduces potential barriers by crossing ages, socio-economics, race and even religion towards the singular purpose of singing together. Since the start, we have chosen songs for their positive messages, but this was the first time that we had been able to clarify our organisation’s own foundation of critical hope.

The response was, as community work always is, unpredictable. The audience flowed in and out, without much opportunity to engage. And as the event was held in the library just after lunch/dinnertime, we were constantly surrounded by people working, reading, or visiting the museum upstairs (or fish downstairs!).

We asked participants to be prepared to give us a few sentences on what keeps them positive, what they do to stay positive, and/or how they support the environment in their daily lives – between songs. We did not expect the majority of our participants to have pre-prepared written mini-speeches, describing the friendships, confidence, motivation and reduced stress that they had gained through joining our singing clubs!

A few quotes: 

“The fact that you’re working with other people, enjoying the time with other people, that makes me feel good.”

 

“Best day of the week”

 

“It uplifts me to sing”

 

“I just like singing all the time, it keeps my mood high.”

 

Each comment was a personal insight into the unexpected joy each person had found through singing which was notable as very few come from choirs or were encouraged to sing throughout their lives. They really deserved to be heard by everyone attending, even the comment from one lady about how her dogs gave her hope and comfort, but as we hadn’t known what to expect, we didn’t have the PA equipment available.

The chatting and mingling afterwards with people from other groups was a powerful reminder of the perseverance of people determined to stay positive. People finding common interests, having a laugh together and spending time with people they would otherwise never have spoken to – becoming their own community.

This event shaped a major decision in the development of the groups. Realising that the power of the group was in the people themselves, their relationships, not the performance, has reframed our interest in performing – we now have months where we sing for the joy of singing, not to perform. We plan fewer songs per session to allow opportunities to talk, share memories, make social plans and continue to build relationship outside of Singing Club. We encourage new ideas that come from within the groups (singing in local parks in the summer, arranging Christmas meals, introducing beginner’s ukulele). And instead of starting more and more groups in more areas, we are investing in our own participants and signposting to our existing groups.

This project has left a lasting legacy in Bolton in ways that no other activity or project could have done, one that we hope to bring back annually as we celebrate not just hope, but critical hope.