Person-Centred Creativity

“This important book comes as a breath of fresh air, in the world of service and workforce development.” Nick Andrews, Research and Practice Development Officer, Swansea University

Person-Centred Creativity (PCC) is a remarkable ten-year collaboration between two artists and a counsellor. It is a unique, incredibly successful initiative. Starting as a cry for help from fatigued Community Artists, it has blossomed and grown into remarkable projects and training programmes deeply embedded in the health and care fields.

The three facilitators work with care and health workers, as well as directly with their clients. The focus is on wellbeing not illness, and they enable the participants to come up with their own solutions to problems and barriers in personal growth, by having fun in a safe environment. The facilitators have enabled hundreds of service users, service providers and managers to experience and recognise their own creativity and strength. This has led to major breakthroughs for service users in terms of their own attitude towards illness and their lives as a whole, large changes in the way in which health and care professionals treat their clients, improving the care planning process in homes for the elderly, mental health institutions, and many other NHS and private organisations.

The facilitators have developed a simple process, paradoxically combining the creation of safe space with the invitation to take risk. They do this by using humour, empathy, imagination and, crucially, by listening to participants.

The reputation of PCC and the three facilitators is international as well as being very locally based in Wales. For the first time, this book opens up their workshops and training programmes, giving examples of the range of exercises they undertake, and is an invitation to artists and healthcare professionals to include such activities in their work.