What We Do: Creative Health

Find out about the work that Daniel, our Wellbeing Projects Officer, is doing to support residents in the borough.

My name is Daniel Huckfield and I am the Wellbeing Projects Officer at The Amelia. My role involves planning, running and monitoring the creative health service. I run courses and activities to support resident’s wellbeing, part of my role involves running outreach sessions for local care homes and community groups. We run a range of groups, including creative writing, arts and crafts groups and even groups using Dungeons and Dragons to support people with mental health needs. My work is varied and stimulating, offering me the opportunity to interact with many people from across the borough.

In the last few months, I have been busy running groups and putting three separate funding bids into funders to extend the work that we do. I love working with people and seeing the benefits and enjoyment people get from the work that we do. We plan about a year in advance and are always working on new ideas that can offer interesting and engaging activities for our residents. A particular highlight of my recent work has been two groups we have run with funding from West Kent Mind, called Roll for Initiative. The groups use Dungeons and Dragons to explore creativity and support people who would like to improve their mental wellbeing. We have run an in-person group here at the Amelia and we are currently running a weekly online group. This is quite a groundbreaking project and has led to a partnership with Plymouth University, which has turned into a funding bid which will allow us to run sessions for four years, fingers crossed we get it!

The future is looking bright for the creative health service, with lots of activities planned and hopefully the three funding bids coming to fruition. We are running another creative writing course in September called Out of this World, which will focus on science fiction and fantasy writing, it is designed for complete beginners and takes participants through how to create a main character, how to create setting and how to use the three act structure for writing, amongst other things. As much as I enjoy developing courses, actually being in a room with people is always the best part of my job.