Working Wonders
History and background
Working Wonders enables vulnerable adults with learning difficulties, physical or mental health problems and isolated elders to participate in creative arts, horticultural therapy and healthy lifestyles activities.
Bromley by Bow Centre has more than 20 years’ experience of working with local people with disabilities through the arts, and has a strong track record in setting up sustainable social enterprises. Working Wonders offers a range of services including day-care and home-care, with a focus on enabling people to work with professional artists and learn key skills involved in running a professional arts enterprise. By providing an integrated range of ‘add on’ services including health and wellbeing, learning and benefits advice alongside our social enterprises, we enable people to move forwards without falling through the gaps that can appear when people move between different service providers.
The Working Wonders model of care is firmly set in the context of the experience of the Bromley by Bow Healthy Living Centre and Community Care project. The primary focus is placed upon the needs and aspirations of the individual, set in the context of the wider community. In practice, this is about creating opportunities which are accessible for all and which encourage full integration and participation. It also seeks to blur the definitions between the user and the provider, as with the Community Care project, where the mantra is 'who's helping who?'
Our services:
The Community Care day-care programme
The Healthy Lifestyles health education and exercise programme
Next steps - to help people move into work
Young @ Art for elders
PoLLeN - therapeutic horticulture
Home-care and life coaching
Find out more
If you might be interested in joining our activities, we would love to hear from you! Come for as short or as long a time as you like. Please get in touch with Ruth Roberts, Working Wonders Enterprise Manager, to arrange a try-out visit! Call 020 8709 9841, or email ruthr@bbbc.org.uk for more information.
Evaluation
Between 2002-5, the Bromley by Bow Centre's work with older people was evaluated by the University of Central Lancashire in a study that was funded by the Dunhill Medical Trust.
"The Centre's arts-based, cross-generational integrated approach mobilises a sense of possibility and an enthusiasm for life, a 'wish to be whole'. This impels integration of the senses, restoring delight, imagination, sociability and pleasure of communication. The Centre's concept of health promotion, grounded in inclusion and relationship, goes far beyond providing information.... The Centre's work with older people goes well beyond the approach set out in contemporary policy."
S. Bruckner, University of Central Lancashire report, 2006
