CHWA ‘Common Ground’ conference callout

Location: Barnsley

Deadline for proposals: Tuesday 26 May 5pm 2026

Workshop/activity fee - £150

Artist residency fee - £1,000 (inclusive of preparation)

Propose a workshop or artist residency for a three-day event centred on creative health.

The Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance is a free-to-join membership organisation for creative health across England. We build networks, support and resources for people who work with creativity and culture to support health and wellbeing; and advocate for this work across the health, cultural and other sectors.

The Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance is seeking two types of proposals for its next conference, on 7-9 October at Barnsley Civic, on the theme of Common Ground:

1. Creative workshops or activities (up to 1 hour) that might take the form of: a facilitated discussion or exploration of an issue or topic; an exploratory, reflective or meditative space that could include making something; or a movement- or walking-based activity (indoors and/or outdoors).
2. An artist residency (across the 3 days of the conference) that engages attendees in an open, inclusive and participatory way and connects with key themes below. Ideally, we’d like there to be a final co-produced artwork (in any medium), that captures the key messages and energy of the event.

There are number of key themes taking shape and we’d encourage you to respond to one or more of these:

• Working at the ‘edges’ of creative health: in or across arts & culture, health & care, museums, schools, communities, planetary, social justice, and other sectors and settings
• Economies, placemaking, inclusion, neighbourhood health
• Empowerment, leadership and coproduction
• Local and global cultures, migration, cross/multiculturalism

As ever we're especially interested in hearing from under-represented creatives including people of diverse heritages, genders and sexualities, people identifying as d/Deaf, Disabled or neurodiverse, and younger people...

For the workshops and activities, we can offer a free conference ticket. If you are freelance or otherwise not covered for this work by your employment, we can offer a fee of £150. We can also cover freelancers’ travel costs. If you are employed and your organisations can support your travel costs we’d be very grateful, but if not, we can help. Please do let us know about any other access needs or preferences we can support.   

For the residency, we can offer £1,000 (inclusive of preparation), plus free tickets to the conference, travel and accommodation as necessary. A materials budget is also available and will be agreed following selection. 

The workshops and activities will be in rooms at Barnsley Civic that hold 50, 30 or 12 people.

The artist residency will be based in the Panorama space, a large open plan area where lunch, teas and coffees will also be served, but it could also have satellite or breakaway elements.

At this stage we're just keen to hear your ideas – please fill out the form and we will let you know if you're successful, and then we can work together to refine your proposal. If you are interested in both the workshops and the residency, tick the appropriate box and explain your idea for each (or how you would adapt the same idea).

You can complete the form here or download a word document version of it here. If you're using the word version, please email it back to applications@culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk. There is an option to submit an audio or video file on the form, or you can email it to us at applications@culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk.

We will do our best to make our selection and inform all applicants within 3 weeks of the deadline.

You can listen to an audio version of this callout here

We welcome and encourage applications from candidates who are under-represented in the creative industries.

Please make sure that you state in your application that you found this role via Creative Access.