Irish Hospice Foundation: Arts Roundtable Gathering

Everyone involved or interested in the Irish Hospice Foundation’s arts and creative engagement programming is invited to attend the first Arts Roundtable Gathering on 15 June 2023 in Dublin.

In 2020, with the support of Creative Ireland, Irish Hospice Foundation started an Arts and Creative Engagement programme to provide people with more opportunities to discuss dying, death, and bereavement. Since then, numerous artists, cultural, health, community, state agencies, and educational organisations have collaborated on ways to reduce the impact of bereavement on Irish people using a diverse range of creative practices.

Programmes
Irish Hospice Foundation’s arts programmes include 56 Seed Grants, 12 Compassionate Culture Networks, two artists working ‘in service to people at end of life’, four artists creating wellbeing tools with the HSE, and a health and wellbeing project with Irish Men’s Sheds Association.

In addition, the Arts & Creative Engagement Team have published two books (one a best-seller), acted as consultants on developing Seed Grant type projects funded by the Department of Health Northern Ireland, and supported selected signature artists on a bespoke basis as part of their ‘Signature Works’. They have also accumulated a Digital Assets Database containing a rich suite of resources documenting the results of the arts programme in its first two years.

Event details
The purpose of this event is to share learnings from the past three years, consider a spectrum of forms of loss and creative responses, and reflect on the benefits of creative work in loss and bereavement.

The Arts & Creative Engagement Team will share the results of their evaluation processes, consider the potential of their programmes to address mental health issues generally, and collectively explore and discuss potential strategies for sustaining and diversifying their current suite of creative practice programmes.

Films from the Digital Assets Database will also be screened with a view to promoting discussion on potential strategies for developing a formal evaluation process on the impact of arts in mental health programmes generally.

Through this event, the team hopes to:

• Initiate a national peer network of creatives working in the areas of end of life, bereavement, grief, and loss.
• Articulate the elements of best practice.
• Identify existing local assets which practitioners can draw from.
• Establish direction, enthusiasm, and support for the next two years of development.

Registration 
Reserve your spot here: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/arts-and-creative-engagement-roundtable-gathering-tickets-629256371747

Feature image: Memories , Elaine Mears and Marie Murray, IHF Seed Grant Recipients  2022 – 2023.