Our Songs Our Stories

Our Songs Our Stories was a creative health project organised by Culture Shift. It was founded on the body of evidence around the impact of music-based activity on people living with dementia and those who care for them, and saught to improve physical and mental health, improve connections and relationships, combat loneliness and isolation

This project was originally commissioned by East Sussex County Council Public Health with the key aim of exploring models of practice that can meet the growing needs in our community, achieving quality and sustainability through partnership, skills, and resource development.

The first phase of the activity focused on delivery within care settings in locations with high levels of deprivation and need; in Newhaven in partnership with Sussex Community Development Association and in Sidley with Southern Housing as well as two care homes in Hastings, Castlemaine Care Home and Grosvenor House Care Home.

Culture Shift deliver a diverse portfolio of projects, working with a wide range of beneficiaries including children and young people, disabled people, their families and carers. Partnership working is fundamental to their approach to project delivery and partners include local authority and public service providers, arts and cultural organisations, schools, colleges, and universities.

As part of the wider commission, University of Brighton researchers via the Community 21 Research Excellence Group initiative worked with Culture Shift and a team of lived experience users and arts practitioners to co-design engaging training and knowledge exchange resources to support arts practitioners to develop their skills and practices for application within health provision.

The project identified the need to develop design outcomes, presenting quality design values and methods within the resources that balance the needs and expectations of arts practitioners to co-learn as a community of practice, ‘packaging’ prompting the sharing of co-learning experiences and building confidence to work within this context.

The data shows that the project enabled participants to build deeper connections with their peers, carers and support staff as well as the Creative Facilitators. This included many examples of direct peer support and advocacy between individual older people and support and peer signposting between unpaid carers. It enabled an elevation from the routines and boredom of everyday life. Crucially, there are also many reports of participants feeling a greater sense of agency through the sessions. There was one direct example of real time improvement in physical wellbeing.

Benefits can be directly linked through the data back to the co-creation model and inclusive, asset-based facilitation style, which stems from the ethos and approach of Culture Shift that is core to all their work. The use of creative arts as a vehicle for enabling wellbeing through empowerment and validation of the person is clear, as is the value of the end product of the art or music output itself. The data indicates that the employment of established, experienced musician/artists as Creative Facilitators with high levels of expertise in their media and in facilitation was fundamental to this.