What We Do
Well Arts’ mission is “to explore, develop, and practice creativity as a means to wellness.” We partner with residential, service, and advocacy organizations to work with the people they serve facing life altering health issues. At our partner organization we facilitate creative writing and visual art workshops. At the end, each participant receives a bound book of their creations. Our partner organization receives a bound anthology of all participant creations. We then pair participants with professional actors, who rehearse with the writer. The actor performs the stories onstage for the general public, either onsite, or at a traditional theatre space.
We have worked with children and adults living with cancer, children with Juvenile Diabetes and their families, adults with AIDS, Mulitiple Sclerosis, veterans, people in drug addiction recovery, and elders. There is compelling evidence today that after a traumatic, life-changing event an individual benefits greatly from creative expression. The arts give us tools to look back and evaluate our life’s journey, to find meaning in life events, and to lower the anxiety, fear and depression that so often aggravates traumatic health issues. Creative work allows a person to take an experience in which they feel powerless, and create something from it that endows their experience with meaning and hope, giving them a sense of control. Bringing their experience to the public, through creative storytelling, gives a voice to the disenfranchised. The public experiences ‘what it would be like’ in a way that simple facts and figures cannot achieve. We all benefit from understanding the experiences of the elderly, the struggling, the survivors in our community.
Our Vision:
To advance and promote the relationship between the arts (performing, visual, literary, movement and music) and wellness.
Well Arts Program Goals 2011-12
Voices of Our Elders Drop In Classes
To create an ongoing opportunity in local centers in Portland for elders to learn, socialize and express themselves (in accordance with the best brain health research of our day) in an environment that honors their wealth of experience, providing them a cultural voice in the local community through public performances and published books at the Senior Center.
Soldier’s Heart: Reclaiming Ground
To provide veterans access to artists dually trained in arts & culture, and counseling and social work, who can provide as many veterans as possible with expressive ways to effectively tell their stories to friends, family, and support networks from whom they feel isolated, due to their experiences with PTSD.
Returning Heroes
To provide ongoing writing and storytelling workshops for past participants, bridging the many communities we work with, in shared storytelling and performance in pursuit of our mission to practice creativity as a means of wellness, in a way that keeps an open cultural dialogue between writers and community members about issues significant to the members of our communities.
Nurses’ Story Project
To provide simple, focused creativity workshops for nurses, in a way that doesn’t negatively impact already packed schedules, but allows them opportunities to use art as a way to explore and make sense of their work and experiences, providing ways for their art to be shared with the community at large in a way that brings how we treat healthcare and healing to a positive public dialogue.
Beautiful Minds
To create nurturing, supportive writing workshops for NAMI consumers that gives them an environment in which they can be creative successful, and artistically honest and powerful.
To create performances from the writings that allow the audience to empathetically access the experiences of the writers.
To create a book that is a keepsake of the experience, and a reminder of the power of the stories shared.
