This year Creativity and Wellbeing Week and Mental Health Awareness Week occurred simultaneously May 18-22.
Everything we do at Outside Edge celebrates the shared goals of these two campaigns, so we thought it might be good to capture how we used creativity to improve people’s wellbeing and mental health over the past 5 days alone. As you can see, it’s been an incredibly busy and productive week!
On Monday, our intermediate group Edge Two filmed the scenes they have been rehearsing over the past few weeks.
Tuesday saw the Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre join our weekly Theatre Club for a Q&A about directing the hit production of Cyprus Avenue.
Every Wednesday we deliver two of our drop-in groups, Write Now and Drop-in Drama, which were busier than ever this week.
On Thursday we were thrilled to welcome back our Women’s Drama Group in a new format. Later in the evening everyone was invited to take in the Curve Theatre Leicester’s production of What the Butler Saw for our weekly Theatre Trip.
Finally, Friday saw the highest attendance yet for our weekly Peer-led Check-in.
Alongside of all this wellbeing and mental health support and creative engagement, we also hosted a Q&A for emerging writers with Tony Award- winning playwright Enda Walsh, who is chairing the judging panel for our upcoming Phil Fox Award for Playwriting.
We wish we could say we programmed everything above for the two campaigns, but actually this is just our regular schedule of weekly activities for people affected by addiction. That being said, at this point in the week we’re pretty Zoomed out and very pleased the weekend is just around the corner!