Scaling up creativity & connection: Chris Doucette & the Foundation for Art & Healing

The Foundation for Art & Healing wasn’t originally on my list of Churchill interviewees. But with some extra time in Boston, I came across the work of Dr Jeremy Nobel. Dr Nobel was unavailable, but Chris Doucette, the Foundation’s Executive Director, swiftly made some time for me. Their current focus is ‘Project Unlonely’, addressing loneliness and the myriad health issues that it causes, but I’m also curious about Dr Nobel’s earlier work in response to traumatic events such as Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon. 

Chris explains that Dr Nobel established the Foundation for Art and Healing twenty years ago, initially around investigating how the arts can help with trauma. Dr Nobel saw an exhibition of art by children memorialising September 11, from which he learned that seeing a traumatic experience on repeat, like footage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers, is different for adults and kids. While the adult brain can interpret the image as a single event, a child will interpret it almost as if it’s happening anew each time. Not only can art help kids cope with trauma, but, Dr Nobel learned, ‘the improvements in their emotions were democratised across race and class - a very compelling intervention for dealing with trauma’.

Consequently, a focus on how art-making and creative expression can help people deal with trauma formed the Foundation’s early work. Dr Nobel worked with veterans experiencing PTSD, participated in creative arts-based support for natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy and developed guidance for parents to use in communicating with their children about the mass killing tragedy at Sandy Hook. However, the Foundation’s focus changed after a study which brought low income African American women with diabetes together, in order for them to deal with the trauma of having a chronic illness. 

After a six week art-making intervention, the study discovered that the main benefit this group of women experienced was, quite simply, connection. It also revealed the unexpected impact of loneliness on chronic health conditions. Finally, the study showed that addressing the loneliness associated with having a chronic health condition improves health outcomes, from the practical, such as medication adherence, to the emotional and psychological. Project UnLonely was born from this focus group, and the Foundation for Art and Healing has been ramping up investment in it ever since.

A big part of Project UnLonely is designing and rolling out creative interventions. Every workshop has three main components: mindfulness, creative expression,  and social and emotional learning. The mindfulness component is usually a simple breathing exercise, which allows people to begin by connecting with themselves. The creative exercise, which follows a simple prompt such as ‘remember something kind someone did for you’, can be in a variety of art forms, including drawing, poetry, or movement. Abstraction and simplicity is encouraged - lines, squiggles, dots, whatever. Chris is very clear that the Foundation is not teaching people how to do art: ‘we facilitate an art-making experience, just people expressing themselves. We have a phrase at the Foundation for Art & Healing - no Picassos!’

The final component is social and emotional learning. Once you’ve expressed yourself, you pair up and share your art. The whole process only takes an hour, and in every workshop, each person has a chance to create, to share, and to listen. I say that I see how an exercise like this might help someone feel a bit safer taking the next step of sharing with someone more qualified to help them through their issues.

Chris agrees: ‘You can’t solve loneliness in one workshop. You can’t solve anyone’s emotional and mental challenges. But what we did find is that by participating in a workshop like this, we found a 50% increase in those participants joining something else - either on campus or outside the college or university. It helps inspire people to say, I joined this thing I didn’t know about, and I had a really great experience, and now I feel safe to go join something else, or seek out support somewhere else. So that’s a 50% increase in engagement with something else, which is exactly what we want, because the more we connect, the more we’re able to get our needs met.’

‘Everyone can have a shared experience that feels safe and enjoyable, and yet expressive and authentic. It’s deceptively simple, and people really enjoy the chance to express themselves in that way.’

‘Deceptively simple’ is actually critically important. Foundation projects use a public health model:

1. Is it effective?
2. Is it scaleable?
3. Is it sustainable?

Seeking a ‘yes’ to these questions creates programs that can be replicated by others easily and affordably. Workshop facilitators require no specific licensure or certification. For example, the Foundation’s ‘Campus Colours and Connection’ workshop can be facilitated by a faculty person or a student - no special training required beyond a one-hour ‘how to facilitate the workshop’ session. It’s easy to recruit facilitators and roll programs out nationwide.

As the Foundation has such a strong public health background, I ask Chris how it confronts the issue of keeping clear boundaries between what art can and cannot do. Chris reframes the question: ‘How do you get involved without getting involved too deep, or deeper than the facilitator is qualified handle? How do we manage that? What we tell people is that number one, we are not a research institution. We are not doing “capital R” Research. Number two, our programs are not therapy, and they’re not promoted as therapy. Number three, we refer to our programs as experiential - more like “emotional stabilisation workshops”. We’re asking people to feel their feelings and express them, but with prompts that really limit the depths to which they reveal themselves.’

He gives an example of a prompt they wouldn’t use: ‘what is the one thing you wish you were forgiven for?’ It’s a deep question which can easily bring people to a traumatic space. Instead, the Foundation limits prompts so that people have a safe space to express themselves, but are unlikely to go beyond what a facilitator can handle. 

The Foundation’s emphasis on public health has got me thinking. One of my first steps is likely to be creating an advisory council of trusted collaborators, moving to a more formal board structure at a later point. I hadn’t thought about having a public health representative in either group, but maybe I should, to make sure we’re aligning with best practice in mental health, and not overstepping our boundaries as an arts organisation. I point out to Chris that artists don’t always think about safety. ‘Good for artists!,’ he responds. ‘They can be reckless and break boundaries, and we learn from that.’ 

Yet he still thinks there may well be value in having someone involved in my project who can consider it from a public health perspective. He points out it’s very easy to create a project that will help a small group of people. Spending a million dollars on fifty people is highly likely to get great results, but it may not scale. Using a public health model ensures Foundation projects can be replicated, which Chris considers key: ‘I think that if we want to make change in this world, we have to make it reach as many people as possible.’

The elephant in the room is, of course, that classical music isn’t very scaleable. Chris says part of the Foundation’s philosophy is not teaching “Capital-A Art” for that very reason. ‘You can’t learn to play a violin in sixty minutes. But what you can do in sixty minutes is hum. What you can do is get everyone to hum together.’ And he gives an example of doing exactly this at the Foundation’s recent twentieth anniversary event. Chris says it felt ‘ethereal’ and ‘was such a connecting and warm experience. Sure a violin is more sophisticated, but that moment gave everyone what they needed in just a brief period of time.’

Still, there is also value in simply observing art. ‘If you engage in creative expression, it helps improve your mental and physical health, and it helps you reduce loneliness and foster connection, but observing art can also make you feel less lonely and improve your mental health and well-being. You need to do more than just observe art, but observing art does have its place and its role in public health.’

I finish by asking Chris if there’s a particular aspect of the Foundation’s work that he’d like to share with Australians. He recommends Dr Nobel’s recent book, Project UnLonely: Healing our Crisis of Disconnection, describing it as the playbook on the connection between loneliness, art-making and the brain, and how creative expression is uniquely suited to combating loneliness. He also suggests this three minute video summary to whet your appetite.

It’s been an energising and thought-provoking discussion. Chris sends me plenty of follow-up material, linked below. ‘No Picassos’ rule notwithstanding, the Foundation has curated some pretty great art in Project UnLonely’s name: a series of free short films. If you’re looking for somewhere to start, try The Artisan. See if it makes you cry, too.

Project UnLonely Films
150 short films on loneliness and connection
https://www.artandhealing.org/puf-get-access/ (yes - you have to sign in, but they don’t spam you)

Podcast with Dr Jeremy Nobel:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finding-connection-through-creativity-with-dr-jeremy/id1772701967?i=1000673164674

Try out some of the creative exercises for yourself at The Creativity Hub

With thanks to Chris Doucette & Dr Jeremy Nobel for their feedback