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Mental Health Awareness Week and Creativity & Wellbeing Week 2020

Some of Thrive LDN's activities during Mental Health Awareness Week and Creativity & Wellbeing Week 2020.

Some of Thrive LDN's activities during Mental Health Awareness Week and Creativity & Wellbeing Week 2020.

Mental Health Awareness Week

Hosted by the Mental Health Foundation, Mental Health Awareness Week’s (MHAW) theme this year was kindness.

During Mental Health Awareness Week, hundreds of events take place around the country to raise awareness for mental health.

Creativity & Wellbeing Week

Hosted by the Arts in Health Forum and partners, Creativity & Wellbeing Week’s theme this year was positive futures.

Moving to an online programme of activity, Creativity and Wellbeing Week highlighted the work happening around the country bringing together culture, creativity, health and wellbeing.

Here are some of Thrive LDN’s activities during the week.

Our City Together

On Tuesday 19th May, we held a virtual panel session to help mark the launch of our partnership with the City of London Corporation and Londonist on the Our City Together campaign. The discussion was titled: ‘Our City Together: how culture, collaboration and creativity can support Londoners wellbeing’.

Chaired by Mike Clewley, Head of Cultural and Visitor Strategy, City of London Corporation​, with a panel consisting of:

  • Charlie Clift – photographer and creator of the Let’s Talk photography and mental health campaign
  • Dr Cerisse Gunasinghe, Post-doctoral Research Associate & Counselling Psychologist, King’s College London
  • Laura Muldoon, Social Media Manager, Museum for London
  • Yemisi Mokuolu, CEO, Hatch Ideas Worldwide

‘Six ways to improve your wellbeing’ card packs launched

As part of our efforts to connect with harder-to-reach communities and those without access to the internet, Thrive LDN have created and distributed almost 100,000 ‘Six ways to improve your wellbeing’ card packs, to be passed out through local authorities and food banks.

The launch of this new campaign was covered by BBC London News on Friday 22nd May.

 

To read more on our six ways to improve your wellbeing, click here.

Creative Workshops

To help celebrate Creativity and Wellbeing Week, we held two virtual creative workshops with artists Tom Philipson and The Fandangoe Kid.

On Wednesday 20th May, Tom Philipson’s Creative Superpowers workshop explored the creative process, the positive effects creativity has on your mind, creativity as a career and we will get hands on by designing and making something for your favourite Superhero.

And to end the week, Friday 22nd May saw visual artist The Fandangoe Kid host an interactive workshop entitled: ‘How can we cultivate softness in what is currently a very hard world to live in?’. During this workshop, the participants reflected on how important it is to cultivate kindness from within, at a time when the world is particularly hard and at a time when we are emerging from extended periods alone, where our mental health and resilience has really been challenged.

Act On Podcast

We released the first two episodes of Season 2 of the Act On Podcast.

For the start of Season 2, we have broken from our usual format with a special set of podcasts recorded in the context of the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and the challenges faced by Londoners because of this.