Well Arts Institute

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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.