The Culture for Health and Well-being Compendium is a very practical guide for those interested to design, improve or scale up effective cultural interventions aimed at improving health and well-being.
CultureForHealth reflects the European Commission’s recognition that culture can have health and well-being benefits. But what are these benefits exactly and how can they be unleashed and supported by European, national and local actors and decision-makers? These questions were among the starting points of the CultureForHealth report, which summarises a review of existing academic studies and other documents and makes recommendations with the aim of triggering policy change and bringing the health, cultural and social fields closer together.
How can this knowledge be used as inspiration by cultural organisations across Europe? To provide an answer to this question, alongside the research and policy report, CultureForHealth also supported six pilot projects across Europe, which you will find in Chapter 2 of this compendium. The projects provide examples of cultural interventions focused on generating a health and well-being impact, and building bridges between local actors and EU policymakers. This compendium reflects on the lessons learned from these projects.
Finally, to facilitate cross-sectoral and trans-European cooperation aiming at both sharing, collecting and creating knowledge, CultureForHealth also developed a series of roundtables and study visits to Denmark, Italy and Romania, webinars and workshops – whose learnings also contributed to the writing of this document.
