Community of Creative Practice for Children's Mental Health

Project Overview

Between 2022 and 2024, Pivot Collective partnered with Impact on Urban Health as the Learning Partner for a programme exploring how creative practice can reshape research and evidence-building around children's mental health in South London.

The programme brought together community practitioners, artists, and grassroots organisations working closely with families and young people. Through a Community of Creative Practice, participants developed and tested creative approaches to exploring children's wellbeing and the social conditions shaping mental health.

Across the programme, seven community-led projects used methods including participatory photography, creative movement, radical participatory design, forum theatre, and collaborative arts practice to generate new insights into children's mental health experiences and support systems. At the heart of the programme was a shared principle: that families, young people, and communities should play a central role in shaping the knowledge and evidence used to design mental health support.

Our Role

Pivot Collective worked as the Learning Partner, supporting both the development of the programme and the collective learning emerging across the participating projects.

We helped design and facilitate the Community of Creative Practice, bringing together practitioners from across South London to exchange methods, reflect on their work, and learn from each other's experiences. Through workshops, mentorship, and ongoing dialogue, we supported practitioners as they developed and implemented creative approaches to community-based research on children's mental health.

The programme also experimented with a more collaborative approach to funding. Instead of competing for grants through a traditional selection process, practitioners worked together to develop and refine their proposals, with funding decisions emerging through dialogue and shared learning. Pivot supported this process by facilitating proposal development sessions, providing methodological guidance, and helping teams strengthen their project ideas.

Alongside this facilitation work, we documented and synthesised learning from across the seven projects. This included capturing reflections from practitioners, identifying common themes across the different methodologies being tested, and developing a learning playbook to support researchers, practitioners, and funders interested in more participatory approaches to children's mental health.

What We Learned

Working across seven diverse creative projects revealed how participatory and arts-based approaches can transform how research and engagement around children's mental health takes place.

Creative methodologies often enabled participants to explore difficult or sensitive experiences in ways that felt safer and more accessible than direct questioning. By working through photography, movement, theatre, and other creative practices, children, young people, and families were able to express perspectives that might otherwise remain unspoken. These forms of “creative distance” helped participants maintain control over how much of their personal experiences they chose to share while still contributing meaningfully to collective understanding.

The projects also demonstrated how creative methods can shift traditional power dynamics in research and service design. When communities, families, and young people are positioned not as research subjects but as collaborators and co-creators of knowledge, new forms of insight emerge. Participants were able to articulate their needs, critique existing systems, and imagine alternative forms of support in ways that are rarely possible within conventional research processes.

Another key lesson was the importance of sustained engagement. Trust, confidence, and meaningful collaboration developed gradually over time, often through regular sessions that combined creative practice with shared reflection. As relationships deepened, many projects moved from more structured facilitation toward increasingly collaborative and participant-led forms of inquiry.

Finally, the programme highlighted the value of creative documentation and collective outcomes. Exhibitions, performances, publications, and public events helped recognise the expertise of participants and share their insights more widely with families, practitioners, and decision-makers. These moments of public sharing not only amplified community voices but also helped strengthen connections between grassroots practice and institutional systems responsible for shaping children's mental health support.