Animating Heritage and Stigma

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The Animating Heritage and Stigma project will build on the successes of two Connected Communities funded programmes - Heritage and Stigma, and Untold Stories of Volunteering. The shared aims of these original and discrete projects were to allow their participants to help shape the projects they were part of and thus represent themselves in their own terms. In particular, service users and volunteers were invited to co-design the research and co-produce its output. This new project aims to take the findings from Heritage and Stigma, which reflected the 'ordinariness' of mental health and learning disability, and use the techniques crafted by the Untold Stories of Volunteering to reach new audiences. We will use the existing testimonies collected and created by Heritage and Stigma and 'animate' them by employing Cultural Animation, a methodology of stakeholder engagement and knowledge co-production developed by Untold Stories of Volunteering to explore key themes. Cultural animation allows participants to co-produce stories using plays, songs and other creative activities to give participants a 'voice'. Pioneered by the team at the New Vic Theatre and Kindle Partnerships, who are partners on this bid, it involves acknowledging and critically approaching existing power and knowledge hierarchies and taking steps to minimise them. This way of working was unforeseen in the original Heritage and Stigma project,which was limited by its terms of reference to capture service user testimonies and to present them as part of a museum project. It was also limited in terms of its geography focusing in and around the Leeds city region. Similarly, the focus of Untold Stories was not on mental health but by employing its Cultural Animation techniques the partners will work together to ensure the long-term legacy of this new project by consulting with and showcasing outputs to key stakeholders and policy makers on a national and international level. This will allow us to create new and meaningful ways of dissemination that also broaden the geographical scope. It will also develop and provide a toolkit for community groups, broadly defined, to explore their own heritage and histories. This interest from community groups was also unforeseen in the original projects and toolkits will allow us to give the original research value beyond the original group of co-producers. To achieve our goals, the project team has identified five key stakeholder groups with whom we will work. These are school groups, mental health and learning disability professionals, social policy makers, international 'gatekeepers' in the USA and Japan, and community researchers. None of these groups were foreseen in the original Heritage and Stigma bid and these stakeholders have been chosen, not only for their demand and interest in the project but also because of their ability to effect organisational change. In each case, the participants will be introduced to the issues arising from Heritage and Stigma, focusing on the pathways to acceptance and understanding of marginalised groups. Overall the project will encourage participants to challenge notions of stigma with a view to improving the understanding and acceptance of marginalised groups. The project's key outcomes will be: 1. The co-creation and dissemination of a transformative drama for use in schools during the lifetime of the project and beyond. 2. The development of cultural animation materials to be used in conjunction with the drama to inform the training of mental health professionals in an understanding of patient and service user perspectives. 3. The creation of a 'toolkit' for community researchers to explore their own histories which will be tested and shared at key points in the life time of the project. 4. The co-creation and dissemination of project outputs to policy makers at a national and international level with a view to creating inclusive dialogues about the nature and future of care.