Insights into a year of policy co-creation
Throughout 2023, City Hall teamed up with Arts Council England and London Arts and Health to create and deliver a co-design process with Londoners interested in the potential of developing London as a Creative Health City.
We brought together over 500 people: artists, creative practitioners, doctors, public health experts, link workers and many more, through a series of events and exchanges. This resulted in a big public event in November.
We commissioned researcher and creative health expert Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt to evaluate our process, distil the ideas generated, and help tease out some ways forward to develop London as a Creative Health City.
This blog post shares what we did, how we went about it and outlines future priorities.
What we did
We asked this question: what might London look and feel like to those who live and work in London if it was a Creative Health City? What difference would it make to Londoners’ health and wellbeing, and how could this become reality?
Over an eight-month period we held three design sprints. These sessions were spaces for conversations and detailed thinking, and time to unpack challenges and propose solutions.
These sprints led us to a large-scale event – an open invitation for 36 conversations – in one magnificent space at Battersea Arts Centre. This was an opportunity to show the scale, maturity and passion of the people working across the creative health sector in London.
#1 Conversation
Opening process at Wellcome Collection
#2 Conversation
Building a model for the Creative Health City at Science Gallery London
#3 Conversation
Sense testing the model at Hoxton Hall
Unconference
Building the movement – sharing agency and ownership at Battersea Arts Centre
Next development phase announced
Our researcher observed that the policy design process we developed:
- involved the sector and people with lived experience in its co-design
- celebrated the capital’s diversity
- thought about embedding creative health in the community beyond health and care systems
- worked collectively rather than competitively.
A creative health city feels really big and meta, but everyone today has talked about what is on your doorstep.
The values and principles that led and underpinned our conversations were:
- Balancing the room: ensuring diversity of invitees and creating partnerships to reach to different people.
- Equity of access: good hosting, anonymity, bursaries and access provision.
- Focusing on outputs and policy-design impact.
- Supportive frameworks for facilitating and note taking.
- Encouraging playfulness to enlighten imagination and enable innovation.
What intrigued you to come to this conversation today?
What might a creative village look like?
- Know that your expertise is not a statistic, but a story!
- Creating a sense of community.
- What does health mean to different people?
- Access to the village. “Without you in my village, I wouldn’t p=know your perspective!
- Who decides who the experts are?
How do we create a legacy and sustain this work together?
- How do we help the creative industries understand the nuance of the health sector?
- What is art? And who decides what’s accepted?
How does the creative health contribute to the most urgent and pressing needs?
- Stop this culture of going back to the way it was!
- Compassion. Sometimes you don’t know what you need until you see it!
- A sign of respect is speaking a common language
- You know your work really makes a difference
- Talk about your mental health!
How do we know who we’ve excluded?
- Celebrate the creativity of the individual or the citizens
- Some people are suspicious of creativity
- Start local!
- Do we minimise the amount of doors? Or do we open different forms of doors?
- Creative a village requires a breakdown of the barriers and embracing the seldom heard?
Why do we have to wait for a report to take action?
- There’s a constant top down approach to agency
- NASP has lists of all the cultural reports that have been done ti back up culture and health
- See the person not a statistic. What if we placed the money in the hands of the individuals?
- How can we embed creative health at its core? Not just time stamped bits of research
London Arts and Health, Greater London Authority, Arts Council England
What we heard
- This Creative Health City should be built from the inside, from the local and inter-personal, in our neighbourhoods and urban ‘villages’.
- Creative health needs to be integrated into all aspects of our lives.
- Creative health is here to stay, supporting our health and wellbeing long into the future.
Preventative not reactive.
There were calls for:
- Equitable, cradle-to-grave access to integrated, person-centred creative health.
- More long-term, inflation-proof unrestricted funding.
- A joint pot of creative health funding – from health, arts, education, sports, nature and ethical companies – with multiple entry points for applicants.
- Place-based partnerships with health and creativity in the same place.
- Communities at the heart of commissioning.
- Open referral pathways across society.
- Lived experience co-design of activities and evidence.
- Creative health apprenticeships for all ages.
- Genuine diversity, reflecting the global majority.
We want an integrated system working collectively to support the village in the capital.
What next
From close listening at the policy design events, we identified principles to take this work forwards:
- Build the Creative Health City from the ground up.
- Improve commissioning routes.
- Direct investment according to need.
- Share knowledge and tools, evidence and evaluation.
- Develop the creative health workforce.
- Make creative health integral to the future of London.
We're delighted all this work has had extra momentum through the APPG Creative Health Review, published December 2023. This invites metropolitan mayors to “...support creative health and work in partnership with ICS leaders to deliver develop sustainable creative health infrastructure at scale, making best use of local assets”.
It seems we are now moving towards a tipping point to reaching the goal. Through partnerships and collaboration, we’re on the journey to build London Creative Health City, together. City Hall and our partners, and the many thousands involved in supporting Londoner’s to thrive, continue to explore how to activate London’s resources to meet this ambition.
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