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How we can support you with Our Day Out

January 17, 2022
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If you’re looking to feel more connected, inspired, and improve your day-to-day happiness, one way we can support you is by getting creative through our Arts and Wellbeing Programme for older people, ‘Our Day Out’. Let’s take a look at some of the adventures that the participants have had over the past year!

The Royal Society for Public Health award-winning ‘Our Day Out‘ programme focuses on providing high-quality music and movement inspired dance experiences for older people in 6 groups based in West Norfolk, Breckland, and North Norfolk!

Its main aims are to tackle and reduce loneliness, maintain social connections with us and sustain and enhance participants wellbeing.

To date, the ‘Our Day Out’ programme has engaged over 450 beneficiaries and has also provided dementia awareness training and new employment opportunities for 80 artists/practitioners and volunteers.

We have not been able to run regular in-person sessions during the pandemic. As a response, we created and developed a series of monthly Creative Wellbeing Packs‘ with a CD curated by a different professional artist each month. Since April 2020, we have created 28 wellbeing packs and have sent these to 120 ‘Our Day Out’ participants.

Over the past year, the programme has helped reach new and older vulnerable people and bring them together through a range of accessible and accompanying activities.

These include over the phone singing and lyric writing, monthly online socials and workshops, Christmas doorstep carols, a commissioned poem using the groups’ contributions, and whilst the weather was good, some outdoor socials too!

In the last year, 94% of people feel happy and well after receiving the packs, and 83% of participants believe they have someone to call on if they want company or socialise.

Singing at doorsteps 

Here are a few quotes from some of our participants:

– Ann: “Thanks for the pack, I really like them, you don’t know what you are going to get, so it’s exciting. There’s lots of bits and pieces to do!”

– Jean: “I really enjoy going along to the sessions, it’s the atmosphere that I really like, and it’s really really uplifting. My friend told me about it, and I wasn’t sure at first as I get nervous often, but this is so good, because you aren’t being judged- everyone looks at each other and are happy to be out. It’s a great little system and is very well put together.”

– Christa: “The packs are so wonderful; they are so inspiring and there are so many things to do. It keeps you busy each month and I look forward to the post arriving. It’s awfully nice for you to think of us. It gives us something to do!”

Wellbeing pack examples

We will be returning to in-person sessions from March 2022 till August 2022, so please spread the word and get in touch if you would like to know the dates of the upcoming sessions by emailing lea@creativeartseast.co.uk or by calling 01953 713390.

We would love to continue providing activities for the Our Day Out groups, so any donations would be greatly appreciated. To Donate, please click here: – https://www.creativeartseast.co.uk/donate-now.

Additionally, heading into February, our Project Officer, Lea Schiller, will be talking about the ‘Our Day Out’ project at the Social Prescribing through Arts, Culture and Heritage Activities webinar.

Lea heads up the ‘Our Day Out’ programme, and we would like to invite you to come and hear about the work we have been doing, good news stories and some of the project’s outcomes.

Wednesday 9th February 2022, 12 pm to 1:30 pmClick Here to Register

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