At Magic Me, we work creatively, collaboratively, inclusively and thoughtfully. We believe that mental health and wellbeing are foundational to our ability to foster an environment that champions these values. Recently, we highlighted Mental Health Awareness Week and Creativity and Wellbeing Week on our Instagram (check out our posts here and here) to shine a spotlight on the importance of these issues.
Why are we focusing so much on mental health and wellbeing right now?
The challenges of the past few years have underscored how crucial it is to support our community’s mental health. By fostering a culture that prioritises emotional and psychological wellness, we enable our staff, artists, participants and volunteers to engage more fully and creatively in our projects.
What We’re Doing:
From a programme perspective, Our most recent resource: Dare to Imagine – a care home’s guide to creativity captures our learning from Artists’ Residencies in Care Homes. This guide has been thoughtfully designed to promote wellbeing and creativity, aiming to foster a sense of connection, identity, achievement, and occasion for both care home staff and residents. Understanding the demands on care home staff time, we have included activities that can spark creativity and connection in as little as two minutes. Our resource offers inclusive and accessible activities that facilitate individual creative moments, transform environments into creative spaces, and encourage creative togetherness between residents and staff. By integrating these small but meaningful activities into daily routines, we aim to enhance the quality of life in care homes through the power of creativity.
We’ve introduced dedicated weekly wellbeing meetings for our staff with their line managers, providing a safe space for open conversations about personal wellbeing, separate from work discussions. To help our team recharge, we’re trialling a shared week of annual leave during the summer to allow everyone to switch off more fully and alleviate concerns they’ll be returning to lots of work generated by other colleagues. Our belief in the power of creativity and community drives our quarterly learning and support sessions, where artists collaborate, reflect, and grow together. Embracing a healthier approach to meetings, we’re encouraging colleagues to take walking meetings to promote physical health, improve creativity (walking meetings can increase creativity by up to 60%!), and reduce stress. Finally, it can be easy to get so locked into our work we forget to take a break. So, to foster a supportive and collegiate atmosphere, we’ve established shared breaktimes, strengthening team bonds and boosting morale through social interactions.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to roll out initiatives aimed at supporting the wellbeing of our community.
Got an idea of something we can do to support our staff or artists? Email us and let us know at info@magicme.co.uk.