How can play help to capture the impact of co-creative interventions on community wellbeing, mental health and social cohesion? As non-clinical, participatory arts-based projects featuring play and performance continue to grow in popularity in the UK as a form of community intervention, this project seeks to better understand the potential impact of such activities, and to help community practitioners capture and evaluate this impact. 

Existing literature across the humanities and social sciences suggests that participating in playful co-creation can  have significant potential impact on the subjective wellbeing of individuals and communities, for example by providing relief from external problems, boosting mood, reducing isolation, raising confidence and providing opportunities to develop skills and experience achievement. Similarly, it can support participants in personal mental health recovery, by giving them a chance to connect with others, give and receive peer support, build new identities and feel empowered. Finally, play and performance can improve social cohesion by uniting participants in a shared, transformative experience of flow, called co-liberation. 

Such experiences, however, are emergent (meaning simply that they are unpredictable) and ephemeral (meaning simply that the art generated lies within the very process of making, existing as an experience rather than an object), and this makes them difficult to document! This is a major problem for any third sector organisations or community groups running projects featuring play and performance, because oftentimes such groups need to report the impact of their activities to funding bodies, partners and other relevant stakeholders. Currently, facilitators of such community groups face barriers to impact evaluation such as a lack of time, resources or appropriate training. Participants of these community groups may find feedback-gathering activities inaccessible, or else unappealing. Through practice-based research, I am currently investigating how play might help to bridge this gap, making the data-gathering process more engaging for participants and more efficient for facilitators!