Charity's appeal for help to provide art packs for Calderdale's vulnerable children

Arts Drop, led by the Creative Learning Guild charity, brings together a consortium of more than 20 of the borough’s leading arts and culture providers – including the Piece Hall and the Eureka! children’s museum – to work alongside a mental health clinician to design activities for the packs.

The scheme was created as a substitute for its usual work, which involves taking arts and culture into schools and welcoming children to sessions at its own premises or those of partner arts organisations.

Gilly Bryerley, Managing Director of the CLG, said: “Since the lockdown started no one can run the sessions and we can’t work with the children via schools. But because we know the lives that these children lead, and we have an awareness of how risky their situation under lockdown might be, we are taking what we do into their homes.”

Also involved is the Halifax-based illustrator, Chris Mould, who worked on Mytholmroyd-born Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man and Sheffield writer Matt Haig’s A Boy Called Christmas.

Elaine Burke, an Arts and Health Consultant who mentored artists to develop the activities and the content for the packs, said: “Arts Drop hasn’t come from a desire to just distribute crayons, paper and other materials to children. The starting point is how to support wellbeing among the most vulnerable children in such difficult times and Arts Drop, with its variety of tailored activities, is the answer.

“The Arts Drop creative activities are specially designed to bolster children’s wellbeing – for example by learning new skills, finding calm and developing imagination. It’s about connecting children to creativity and wellbeing, connecting them to their cultural community and connecting their cultural community to them.

“The families and households we are targeting are very stressed places and we thought very carefully about how best to use creativity to support them. For example we have avoided messy materials so that children doing the activities can feel the benefits of being creative without the risk of mess and subsequent conflict, stress and upset.”

Packs will go to 1,000 youngsters living in extreme poverty, in foster care or children’s homes, or who are carers for a family member or have refugee and asylum seeking status to help them during lockdown. They may not have access to wi-fi or online devices so cannot access creative activities for children online.

The organisation is looking for commercial support to get the packs to all of those identified as in need, and is hoping to send them out by using “creativity as crisis intervention”.