Creative Horizons

“We don’t want these sessions to ever stop.”
JH, Rondel House

Breathe Creative was grant funded by the Supporting Older People in the Vale Third Sector Preventative Interventions Fund 2021 (Covid-19) to facilitate Creative Horizons, a new project offering music and movement for health and wellbeing for the service users of New Horizons Day Centre (older adults with physical disabilities and complex needs) and Rondel House (older people with dementia and complex needs) in Barry.

Our Creative Horizons project supported service users as well as their families, carers and staff at New Horizons Day Centre and Rondel House. New Horizons Day Service is based in Barry and provides a Day Service for people aged 18-65 years old who have a permanent or substantial physical disability who live in the Vale of Glamorgan (this Day Service is part of the Vale of Glamorgan Council Social Services Department). Rondel House provides a service to predominantly support older people living with dementia and their carers who live in The Vale of Glamorgan.

Due to the restrictions of the Covid-19 Lockdown, many service users were not able to physically attend New Horizons to access their usual activities or support, and many are still not accessing these services for a range of reasons. Service users at Rondel House were isolated from their friends and families which created more issues for their mental health and wellbeing; this pandemic made our community of need (the service users) increasingly vulnerable and isolated from their usual support systems, and our project helped to address this with a creative and supportive programme to improve their physical and mental health and wellbeing.

The managers of both New Horizons and Rondel House identified a need for help for new services and ways of engaging their service users for their increased wellbeing, moving out of the firefighting times of the pandemic and towards a new future, embracing alternative service delivery approaches; they were keen to use the services of the Breathe Creative team to help increase the wellbeing of their clients in this innovative collaborative project.
Creative Horizons helped to increase the independence (as well as the wellbeing) of service users, by developing social support networks, building increased self confidence and resilience, and creating positive patterns of engagement, participation and motivation for the future. This co-productive music and movement partnership between New Horizons and Rondel House also helped to forge greater community links in Barry, by engaging carers, families and staff, developing wider support networks for all involved and supporting a dementia and physically disabled friendly community. Our project brought services users and their carers and staff closer together. Services users taking part experienced social, cognitive, emotional and health benefits.

In addition to the facilitated programme of music and movement sessions, we also created a resource of music and movement activities which could be used at the centres after the end of this project, and we encouraged cares and staff to join in so that they could learn how to support vulnerable people using accessible Creativity for Wellbeing activities, helping to facilitate ‘mini projects’ for service users in the future.

We have a track record in offering training for support workers and carers to develop their understanding of the range of techniques and the ethos behind our creative approaches to wellbeing. Further training for interested staff, volunteers and carers is a future goal of ours, to increase the impact and sustainability of this pilot project further into the future.

Projects facilitated by Ruth Bradshaw (Music and Voice), Elaine Bennett (Dance and Movement), Jon Rattigan (Film), Emma Jones (Visual Arts) and Alex Bowen (Project Management and Admin).