Self Love Creative Wellbeing Project
Self-Love project is devised and facilitated by artist Meera Osborne as an extension of their Making History project following the COVID-19 outbreak. The project seeks to develop a virtual platform for and with women within the community to remain connected. The activities seek to alleviate isolation, build trust and self-esteem and share skills; this has been uniquely delivered via WhatsApp using audio, video, and images.
Creative activities:
During the pandemic I have been running all my workshops online. When I started facilitating PAMOJA women's group using WhatsApp, we had initially planned to run 3 sessions however it became clear quickly that trust takes longer than 3 sessions to build. We made the decision to move the sessions into a rolling format on Friday mornings continuing indefinitely.
Whilst running workshops virtually, I realised one of the challenges was finding ways to be generous to my groups. In the past I did this with abundance of materials, tea and biscuits. In the climate of coronavirus these actions were not possible so I started creating self-care packs for participants which they could explore in their own way in the week.
The workshops are focused on wellbeing, creativity and uplifting each other. I am interested in non-directive learning so the outcome to these sessions are open.
Below are links to some of workshop creative activities; please feel free to enjoy these:
Some activities have been collated into a Self-Love pack which you can download here. These short activities are intended to improve wellbeing through creativity.
Here are two other packs for you to download:
About the artist:
Meera Osborne works across multiple communities teaching sewing and printing to older women and facilitates creative workshops with young people.
I mainly work with people on low income/unemployed and people of colour/people with experience of displacement and/or migration. I am the co-founder of Department for International Dance Development (DIDD) a collective of women and non-binary people, who come together to dance and share food. I also paint in oils. I graduated Design for Stage at Central School of Speech and Drama in 2015 and in 2018 graduated in Liberal Arts at CILAS in Cairo, Egypt https://www.meerashakti.com/Making-History
This project has been funded by ACE and Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum, with delivery support from Nottingham Contemporary Community Programme during Nottingham Refugee Week.