Six challenges facing arts and health

The intersection between arts and health takes shape in different ways around the world. For our 2024 report, What does an arts and health organisation do?, we interviewed 22 arts and health organisations from across the world. We wanted to get a sense of how arts and health work happens around the world and understand the different approaches these arts and health organisations use to advance the field. What emerged from these wide-ranging conversations was a fascinating picture of the passion borne from everyday witnessing the benefits individuals have in experiencing arts and health work. What also emerged was a picture of the many and varied challenges facing these organisations. Here, we will summarise six key challenges and offer some of the solutions arts and health organisations are using to overcome them.

Funding and sustainability

One of the most persistent challenges raised by our interviewees was the issue of sustainability. Arts and health organisations often operate in under resourced environments and securing consistent funding is a significant struggle. The constant work to apply for and acquit short term funding was resource intensive for organisations. Unsurprisingly, organisations with core funding, which provides financial stability, were more able to consistently achieve their aims and meet the needs of diverse end-users by allowing organisations to allocate resources over multiple years. However, core funding is not always available, and others have had to turn to other approaches. For example, when funding for Arts Alive’s museum-based programme for people with dementia came to an end, CEO Yoko Hayashi asked the participants if they would be willing to pay a small fee to keep the programme running; many were happy to do so, and the programme continued.

Alongside funding challenges, many of our interviewees also raised the ever-present challenge of personal sustainability. It became clear that the arts and health sector needs to respond to the health and wellbeing needs of its workforce. Arts and health workers intervene in and provide support for difficult health and social contexts, and this can be emotionally challenging for practitioners. To address this, organisations like Northern Ireland’s Arts Care and London’s Arts & Health Hub provide trauma-informed training for artists, which was identified as beneficial not only for their practice but for their wellbeing. Interviewees also spoke of the importance of networking events in helping to reduce the sense of isolation arts and health workers can sometimes feel.

Diversity

Improving diversity in the arts and health workforce is an important challenge, particularly in countries like Australia and the UK, where the workforce is predominantly white, able-bodied, and middle-class. This lack of representation can distort funding priorities, channel outcomes, and reduce the accessibility of programmes for diverse communities.

Initiatives such as The Artists’ Represent Recovery Network (Arts & Health Hub), Stepping In (Wales Arts Health & Wellbeing Network), and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab’s Global Majority Scholarship are creating supportive pathways for underrepresented groups by providing training and mentorship. These programmes can help break down barriers to entry and provide long-term career development.

Meanwhile, events such as Global South Arts & Health Week work to spotlight research and practice from beyond the Global North, ensuring that arts and health reflects a broader range of lived experiences and worldviews. Many interviewees particularly spoke of the need to respect First Nations perspectives that call for a more holistic approach to arts and health. Increasing the diversity of voices in arts and health can lead to important breakthroughs for the field.

Political support

Our case studies show that arts and health organisations thrive when they have political support. In fact, organisations such as Finland’s Taikusydän and the UK’s National Centre for Creative Health were a direct result of political policies. However, interviewees said that gaining this political interest often relies on using economic justifications for their work, with politicians ultimately focused on cost savings and efficiency instead of the more holistic benefits of arts and health.

Political support can also quickly shift, with examples of declining political support provided by interviewees from New Zealand, the Philippines and Finland. As a result, many interviewees point to grassroots support as driving the most sustainable growth in arts and health. Projects such as Christina Davies’ Good Arts Good Mental Health focus on public messaging around the benefits of arts and health. Ideally, arts and health would have both political and public support, but organisations must continue to raise awareness at both levels. A question for future research may be how to make political support enduring beyond individual champions or revolving buzzwords.

Interdisciplinarity and collaboration

As a field comprised of different knowledge, evidence and research systems, navigating interdisciplinarity and collaboration is at the heart of successful arts and health work. Clashes and misunderstandings between disciplines can stymie effective collaboration. In particular, a number of artists and arts researchers described feeling like those on the health side devalued their work or disbelieved the results of rigorous research projects using humanities or arts methods.

Given these challenges, interviewees spoke of the need for translation work, perhaps employing people with experience working across both arts and health fields to do that work. Other interviewees spoke to the importance of ensuring a balance of different disciplines across an organisation or project, and maintaining that all disciplines, backgrounds and approaches were treated as equal partners.

Building on this idea of collaboration instead of competition, interviewees also spoke about resisting the pressure to constantly innovate. Instead, they told us it is more productive to replicate successful arts and health programmes from across the world and adapt them for local contexts than reinventing the wheel. Alongside learning how to speak one another’s disciplinary languages, and appreciate each other’s values and knowledge bases, one of the greatest lessons arts and health organisations can learn is how best to build upon the years of excellent work already existing in the field.

Definitions

Related to the issue of interdisciplinarity, even the terms at the core of arts and health work are understood differently by different stakeholders, and this can lead to challenges around deciding on acceptable definitions and the meaning of shared key terms. We heard how important it is that organisations decide on the specific definitions that encompass their work before moving forward. For example, whether arts therapy and its specifically therapeutic focus is included in arts and health / creative health / arts-led wellbeing had been a tricky decision for many of the participants we spoke to.

Organisations also need to define complex terms like ‘arts’, ‘culture’, ‘health’ and ‘wellbeing’. We found that organisations’ understanding of these terms often drew on the cultural context in which they worked. For example, Te Ora Auaha’s Borni Te Rongopai Tukiwaho pointed to the Māori concepts of holistic health as underlying the organisation’s approach. Arts and health organisations face challenges in defining these terms but can create opportunities through thoughtful exploration of their boundaries.

Evidence

Finally, we heard in our interviews a lot about organizations’ experiences with the evidence base for arts and health and found that there is much politics involved in the reception of evidence in the sector. Evidence is crucial for advancing the wider field of arts and health, and for garnering support for organisations’ individual projects and missions. Yet the field of arts and health is engaged in an ongoing debate about what type of evidence offers the best new knowledge about the field, with different decision-makers and sectors varying in their expectations. This can be challenging for arts and health organisations, especially if their practice does not conform to the specific evidence requirements often favoured by the health sector. Organisations such as Jameel Arts & Health Lab aim to bypass this debate by supporting a variety of studies that use diverse methodologies, producing quantitative, qualitative and even arts-based evidence for the value and benefit of arts and health work.

Many interviewees also argued that traditional academic evidence is overestimated as a mechanism for unlocking decision-makers’ support, pointing instead to the value of narratives and lived experience. Alexandra Coulter, Director of the UK’s National Centre for Creative Health, spoke about her work sharing lived arts and health experiences during parliamentary roundtables, and how this led to significant shifts in decision-makers’ perspectives. Others spoke about partnering with university-based researchers to generate research evidence for the work they do using a variety of methodologies and instruments. As arts and health organisations continue to build their evidence base, matching the expectations of different stakeholders remains a challenge, but the emotional pull of personal narratives remains an effective strategy for advocacy.

That is what we have strived to achieve in our report on arts and health organisations: spotlighting the lived experience, successes and struggles of those working in arts and health. As our full report demonstrates, each arts and health organisation has its own compelling and enlightening story to tell. Do get in touch for a conversation with us!

Link to the full report: https://apo.org.au/node/328573