Creative Wellbeing Evaluation Report

Starting in 2018, Arts and Culture partnered with the Office of Child Protection (OCP), Department of Mental Health (DMH), and Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), and member organizations of the Arts for Healing and Justice Network (AHJN) to implement healing-centered arts education activities within select public schools known to have a high number of foster, probation, and at-promise youth. This joint initiative, Creative Wellbeing, was designed as a starting point to establish cultures of healing-centered care through arts-based student instruction, professional development, and community-building activities. Creative Wellbeing has since evolved into an approach for building communities of wellness, especially for systems-impacted young people, those at risk of becoming systems-impacted, and the adults who support them.

Following a pilot evaluation that took place in 2019, Arts and Culture partnered with Harder+Company Community Research to conduct the current Creative Wellbeing Evaluation. The goals of the evaluation were to measure the impact of the Creative Wellbeing approach; capture best practices and lessons learned from the 2022-23 implementation to inform future phases of programming; identify opportunities for long-term systemic change; and develop recommendations to improve programming of the Creative Wellbeing approach.