Welcome to Kirsty Meets!
Each month I meet key stakeholders and business leaders in the social care sector. This month I met Lucinda Jarrett, CEO, Rosetta Life. I caught up with Lucinda to discuss the creative arts as an effective care intervention, and how poetry, music and dance can improve quality of life, both for carers and those they support.
So Lucinda, tell me a little about Rosetta Life?
Rosetta Life’s vision is to ensure that every person living with life altering illness or facing loss has the opportunity to lead a full creative life. We develop innovative creative practices that transform lives and improve quality of life. We work with communities to co-create performances that challenge the stigma and perceptions of life altering illness or loss.
Rosetta Life began as a residency programme in hospices called LifeStories. Our goal was to enable each person to share a story from their life experiences to a small audience of family and friends. Online, we were able to link twenty hospices through a website, connecting people and their stories. Since 2005 we have applied the holistic principles of palliative care to other fields of healthcare, including stroke and brain injury, young people facing conflict or displacement, and unpaid carers.
“I used poetry to connect with a loved one in crisis, then I wrote it to help myself, so poetry saved both of us. … As a carer, I have often experienced the despair of feeling unseen and unheard. This evening the Heart of Care project turned that on its head”– Jo Lambert
You’ve been working in healthcare for 25 years, can you tell us a little about the evidence that shows how impactful the arts is in healthcare settings?
For many years, artists and arts organisations felt that they had to justify their programmes could deliver health outcomes on the terms of healthcare researchers. Artists measured blood pressure before and after sessions, measured improvement in gait, balance and fall in the elderly. This evidence was instrumental in showing how arts programmes deliver health outcomes. However, as the evidence grew it became more possible for artists to find new ways to validate arts and healthcare interventions on their own terms. Critical ethnography and Participatory Action Research, for example, show what happens holistically, to observe changes in individuals and in group dynamics, watching the way relationships are formed through group dynamics and the building of community, and to look at what is happening in participation in a creative process. This co-authored research practice empowers people to understand what creativity has to offer and gives all participants ownership of their own transformation.
The Heart of Care project’s been going for two years. What is it and how did it start?
The Heart of Care began as a series of conversations in lockdown. We identified one challenge where the arts could find a solution: to increase the understanding and visibility of unpaid carers through working with visual arts, dance performance and the spoken word.
With a group of carers from Kingston on Thames we ran a series of creative workshops which led to poetry writing and choreographed movement sequences. These we recorded and filmed (greensceen) enabling the edited version to be projected publically in Kingston. https://vimeo.com/908305403
“Heart of Care has been cathartic for carers. The poetry sessions helped us gain trust in each other, release our pent-up feelings and gain confidence in ourselves as poets.”- Penni Cotton
@rosettalife