Celebrating Age
Like a hapless waiter rushing up with your sides just as you finish eating your main course, wondering if they’d be better off keeping quiet… I bring you an addendum to my previous post.
I worked with Imogen Blood and Lorna Easterbrook on the evaluation of Arts Council England and Baring Foundation’s Celebrating Age programme. The final report is now available on Arts Council England’s website.
This was an important project in lots of ways. It began a journey into Most Significant Change for the three of us that has included creating the Story-based Evaluation and Research Alliance, training and being trained and exploring what the technique can do. This year I am working with Future Arts Centres to spread the technique amongst their members.
The project also showed me the great range of work being done with by and for older people. The exclusion people have faced throughout their lives, that co-creation as older people tackles, must be acknowledged within the creative process, but it is obvious creativity can be liberating at any age. I’ve faced some of my own internalised agism as I age (it was a long project). I have also seen how deeply agism is built into cultural discourse and structures, and how thoroughly older people, including older artists, turn over those prejudices. I’ve also seen partnership working at its most complex – the average number of partners amongst the 32 projects in Celebrating Age was 17!
And it’s had a personal side, reflecting on my dad’s experience in sheltered housing in the last years of his life. I love a Hank Williams stars of country tribute turn more than the next man – much more – but many such schemes are missing out on so many possibilities for their residents.
The future of this kind of work seems positive, at least in the next few years – it may be as cyclical as the past – with the work of the Creative Aging Development Agency amongst others. Just today I read the Bank of England see the aging population as a threat – I suggest we see their creativity as an opportunity.
Ok, now we’re all caught up!