Celebrating Age
October 2023
A report on the Baring Foundation and Arts Council England’s fund, Celebrating Age.
Celebrating Age was probably the largest dedicated fund anywhere for creative ageing so far. It was launched in 2017 by Arts Council England (ACE) and the Baring Foundation with a value of £3 million which was increased by further grants from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) for work to tackle loneliness in the pandemic. Thirty-two grants were given over three to four years and half of them have contributed case studies to this report. The fund focused on older people less likely to be taking part in creative and cultural activities.
MAKE Southwest’s Project: A Good Age
For our Celebrating Age project, we partnered with Devon Libraries who provided venues in five Devon towns with reasonable public transport links. MAKE Southwest recruited the tutors, makers already known to us as good, empathetic, workshop leaders, who devised the workshops collaboratively with the participants. The project had two strands: a community strand and a programme for professional artists.
The overall aim of the community strand of the project was to support older people at risk of loneliness and isolation and the theme of all five of the workshop programmes was ‘Change in my Time’. Each tutor worked, with their participants, in one of the following disciplines: photography, ceramics, paper, willow weaving and mixed media. The participants were mainly women (with the youngest in their sixties and the oldest in their eighties).
“At the Private View, the daughter of one of the participants told us that the project had been a lifeline for her mother. It coincided with the serious illness, and then death, of her husband who she cared for at home. Her only outing each week was to attend the workshops where she was able to engage completely with the project, talk to the other participants, and return home feeling energised and capable again.”
Read the full report HERE.
