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Children and young people (CYP) are experiencing a significant mental health (MH) crisis that is threatening their future. Deeply rooted health inequalities perpetuate this crisis and call for immediate action. This project will promote easy access to best practice in local arts activities that support the diverse MH needs of CYP and thus enable them to take better control of their lives. By supporting the MH of CYP the project will meet an important NHS priority contributing towards tackling the health inequalities affecting their lives. We will build on successes from Arts for the Blues (AH/W007983/1), a project that received funding from AHRC for phase one of this programme and successfully scaled up the use of an evidence-based creative psychological intervention in the North West. We will also draw on a track-record of 25+ years of engaging CYP in arts activities, and on our extensive co-production experience. Co-creation will therefore become central to this work. We will focus on CYP aged 9-13, a group at significant risk of developing MH problems whilst transitioning from childhood to early adolescence. They will be encouraged to act as co-researchers developing skills they can use after the completion of the project, ensuring direct benefits. We expect that co-creation will lead to meaningful engagement of CYP with this study that aims to generate new, scalable evidence concerning: (A) how to access arts activities that best support the MH of CYP; (B) how to evaluate arts activities that meet the diverse MH needs of CYP; (C) how to maximise the benefit of arts activities for as many CYP as possible. We will create a digital platform where evidence-based local arts activities will become easily accessible for CYP, their families, relevant organisations and services. We will do this by identifying good local arts practice that addresses the diverse MH needs of CYP, especially those who are often under-represented. Six CYP Creative Health Associates will be employed to work in areas with marked health inequalities and establish local collaborations between community partners and existing social prescribing link workers. They will also work with the research team to provide easy and sustainable access to arts activities and thus, bypass local barriers. The active involvement of Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) (e.g., Lancashire and South Cumbria and Cheshire and Mersey Care), medical leads and medical directors of CYP's MH, NHS trusts, schools and community organisations will encourage collaboration within and across systems, enabling the development of an agreed evaluation framework of best practice in arts activities. This will support streamlining access to therapeutic uses of the arts as well as scaling up and adopting the outputs from the study in the North West and beyond. Finally, we will develop and share the project outputs with our 46 non-academic national and international collaborators, making an active contribution towards tackling health inequalities that benefits the MH of CYP wherever they live.

The project will use multispecies storytelling to engage disadvantaged groups in the north west in decision making processes about landscape and land use. The project follows on from the successful AHRC 'Connecting disadvantaged young people with landscape through arts', 'Stories2Connect' and 'Multispecies Storytelling: More than human narratives about landscape' projects, all of which use storytelling in participatory ways. These projects have worked with disadvantaged and disabled young people, children, and diverse groups of community farm users. The methods and learning gained from previous projects are being brought together and synthesised to engage new audiences, collaborate with new stakeholder organisations and develop new themes of work. Specifically, the project will use multispecies storytelling to develop multisensory artefacts about landscape that capture the voices of marginalised communities and disadvantaged groups and respond to a variety of different ways of making sense of the world. Understanding a landscape from the 'memory' of an oak tree, 'seeing' the land as a bee might, experiencing a space as a soundscape or through touch or smell invites thinking about landscape and land use from different perspectives, through other timeframes and scales. Multispecies approaches have been effective in engaging people with issues related to biodiversity loss and climate change and can encourage identifications and connections with land, environments and other species who inhabit them. They also prompt consideration of whose stories about landscape are being told, and who is enabled to tell them. The follow on funding will be used to expand work with organisations linked to the existing projects and enhance the reach and impact of the projects with new stakeholder organisations. Connections with Burscough Community Farm, Rusland Horizons Trust, Blackpool Council, Art Gene, the Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, local artists and professional storytellers will be maintained and new partnerships with the National Autistic Society, Natural England, Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust Martin Mere, Williamson Art Gallery and Museum and The Chapel Gallery will be enabled by the follow on funding. Through the partners, the project will continue to work with community farm users and young people with disabilities and will also include young people with autism, facilitated by the National Autistic Society. The project will, through new and existing partners, expand the geographical coverage of the previous projects further across the north west to reach new audiences through the partner organisations that have agreed to provide venues for exhibitions and events. The project will utilise innovative participatory methodologies and resources developed in the previous projects which will be applied in the co-creation of a new series of multisensory artefacts that will be curated and exhibited at different indoor and outdoor sites across the north west. The multisensory artefacts and environments developed will use multispecies storytelling and, as well as visual aspects, may also employ, for example, sound, smell, space and touch to respond to the needs and understandings of a wide range of potential users, rather than prioritising traditional or limited sensory engagements with the world. The exhibitions will be accompanied by key events to which decision makers from stakeholder groups and those organisations with vested interests in landscape and land use will be invited.

Home from Home is an Arts & Health project, or creative intervention, that explores the intersection between hospital acute care and social care. The project team will work with the Local Community Organisation (LCO) in Manchester, which is part of Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) and MFT's Arts & Health team known as Lime. The project will work with both patients and staff to explore the realities of community ward care and open up creative discussions about the lived experience of living and working on the four Manchester Community Wards identified. These two particular groups - the LCO patients and the LCO staff - have been identified by the PI during a previous British Academy Innovation Fellowship project (exploring embedding the arts into healthcare settings) as hidden area of healthcare that is neither acute nor social care. During discussions with the Human Resources Business Partner who represents the staff of the LCO it became clear that there is a sense of being hidden within the Trust and the wider public not understanding what their role is within the healthcare system. The patients of these wards, whilst well looked after and able to make their rooms homely, are not however at home and many are seeking to get home. However, they are having to wait for community social care (provided by their council, not the healthcare Trust) to be put in place before they can return to their own homes. The patients are often disabled and/or elderly, and therefore cannot live independently. Some of the patients do not leave the community wards again. Engaging with this patient group therefore gives a voice to a relatively unheard patient group and a staff group who work in a somewhat overlooked healthcare setting. This project would be a pathfinder project that could lead to further projects working in community healthcare settings. The Head of Nursing for the LCO, the HRBP and the Director of Lime are all supporting and contributing to the project because the need for discussion around this system and the future of community wards such as these in the future is clear. The public may not be aware of the vital work these community wards do at this intersection between health and social care, therefore the creative intervention will see artists, patients and staff come together to create artworks that will explore their lived experience. The artworks will be part of an exhibition that will travel to each of the community wards and a film will be made about the project and the discussion it engenders.

The goal of the Thai-coast project is to improve scientific understanding of the vulnerability of Thailand's shoreline and coastal communities to hydro-meteorological hazards, including storms, floods and coastal erosion, under future climate change scenarios. In Thailand the problems of coastal erosion and flooding require immediate solutions because they affect more than 11 million people living in coastal zone communities (17% of the country's population). The Department of Marine and Coastal Resources (DMCR), in the Thai Government's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, has calculated that each year erosion causes Thailand to lose 30 km2 of coastal land. The Office of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning predicts that sea level will rise by 1 metre in the next 40 -100 years, impacting at least 3,200 km2 of coastal land, through erosion and flooding, at a potential financial cost to Thailand of 3 billion baht [almost £70 million] over that time period. The Thai-coast project addresses the urgent need to enhance the resilience and adaptation potential of coastal communities, applying scientific research to inform more robust and cost-effective governance and institutional arrangements. The Thai-coast project aims to (i) establish causal links between climate change, coastal erosion and flooding; (ii) use this information to assess the interaction of natural and social processes in order to (iii) enhance coastal community resilience and future sustainability. The project focuses on two study areas, Nakhon Si Thammarat province and Krabi province, selected on the basis of DMCR coastal erosion data and with contrasting natural and socio-economic characteristics. The Thai-coast project uses a multidisciplinary approach, integrating climate science, geomorphology, socio-economics, health and wellbeing science and geo-information technology to improve understanding of hydro-meteorological hazard occurrence, their physical and socioeconomic, health and wellbeing impacts on Thailand's coastal zone and the ways in which governance and institutional arrangements mitigate their impact. We will examine future scenarios of climate change hydrometeorology, coastal landform and land use change scenarios and assess and model impacts (coastal erosion, river-marine flooding, impacts on health and well-being), as well as population and community's adaptation, and socio-economics scenarios for sustainable development goals (sustainable cities, health-related quality of life and well-being, good governance). Our collaborative team of natural and social scientists, from UK, US and Thai research institutions, have complementary, cutting-edge expertise and will work closely with Thai Government and UK and Thai industry partners to ensure that results are policy and practice-relevant. Thai-coast research will benefit government and policy makers, who need to plan for potential impacts caused by climate change and develop resilient strategies to deal with their impacts on natural-social systems. It will provide a link with government agencies for business/industry interests in the coastal zone of Thailand in tourism, aquaculture and associated industry and business, to assess their needs and help improve their understanding of coastal resilience in their strategic investments and management. The wider public, who inhabit Thailand's coastal communities either permanently or temporarily for work or leisure, will benefit through the advanced knowledge and awareness of identified problems and learning processes to address them. The results of the Thai-coast project will benefit coastal communities more broadly, in all Thai coastal provinces, through its contribution to more robust, cost effective, governance and institutional arrangements.