Health & Wellness through the Arts
The Arts Council’s Health and Wellness through the Arts program connects artists, arts organizations and health service providers to deliver creative opportunities to constituents managing a decline in health, living with a temporary or permanent physical, emotional or cognitive disability, or wishing to improve daily life. Participation in the arts has a direct effect on improving the health and wellbeing of every individual.
Benefits
The National Endowment for the Arts’ Staying Engaged Study reports that creative endeavors lead to higher cognitive skills, lower blood pressure, lower heart rates, and increased endorphins (needed for pain management). Additionally, the North Dakota Council on the Arts’ Art for Life Program Guide affirms that arts participation decreases the impact of loneliness, boredom, and helplessness.
Creative Aging in Wyoming Communities
The Wyoming Arts Council has partnered with the Wyoming State Library and Lifetime Arts to develop a statewide creative aging program based in county libraries. Librarians and teaching artists from across Wyoming will undergo professional training from Lifetime Arts. Then, libraries will apply for grants through our partnership to hire the trained teaching artists to implement creative aging programs in their communities. This is part of our effort for a statewide shift to place intentional arts engagement at the center of elder programming.
Lifetime Arts is a national arts service organization that offers a positive, modern, artistic and social lens through which to serve, inspire and engage America’s growing population of older adults. To date, they have launched over 700 community-based programs, serving more than 10,000 older adults and have trained nearly 2,000 teaching artists and librarians, arts organization and senior service staff members to design, implement, and institutionalize these programs.
This training and grant money is funded in part through the Wyoming Community Foundation’s McMurry Library Endowment Fund, and the May & Stanley Smith Charitable Trust.
Now Accepting Applications for Creative Aging Training
The Wyoming Arts Council is now accepting applications from Wyoming based artists to participate in a virtual training on best practices in Creative Aging. The training will be provided by Lifetime Arts. Additional funds have been secured for county libraries, who are undergoing similar training, to hire teaching artists who complete this training to lead creative aging programs in their libraries.
This training for teaching artists will be held virtually on March 8 – 10. The application and full eligibility requirements can be accessed here. The deadline for applications is Feb. 10, 2021.
Additionally, the Wyoming Arts Council will co-host, with Lifetime Arts, an informational webinar about what this training will involve on Feb. 3. All artists interested in participating in the training are encouraged to attend this webinar. Registration for the webinar can be accessed here.
The training is free for teaching artists, paid for in part by a grant from the Wyoming Community Foundation. The selection process is competitive. Only 50 artists from around the state will be selected to participate. Artists who are selected to participate in the training will receive a $50 honorarium to compensate them, in part, for their time.
Questions? Contact Josh Chrysler at joshua.chrysler@wyo.gov or 307-256-2010.
Survey of Wyoming’s Health & Wellness Interest and Activities
Resources
The National Endowment for the Arts’ Office of Accessibility is the advocacy-technical assistance arm of the Arts Endowment to make the arts accessible for people with disabilities, older adults, veterans, and people living in institutions.
The National Center for Creative Aging is dedicated to fostering an understanding of the vital relationship between creative expression and healthy aging, and to developing programs that build upon this understanding. It offers:
Lifetime Arts’ mission is to encourage creative aging by promoting the inclusion of professional arts programs in organizations that serve older adults; to prepare artists to develop the creative capacity of older adult learners; and to foster lifelong learning in and through the arts by increasing opportunities for participation in community based programming.
The National Initiative for Arts & Health in the Military advances the arts in healthcare, healing, and well-being for military service members, veterans, their families and caregivers.
VSA, the international organization on arts and disability, was founded more than 35 years ago by Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith to provide arts and education opportunities for people with disabilities and increase access to the arts for all.
Contact: Josh Chrysler