Storytelling for Wellbeing: Enhancing Practice and Shaping Policy
Professor Emily Underwood-Lee and Professor Roiyah Saltus, Co-Directors of the George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling, are exploring how storytelling can be an invaluable tool for understanding what matters.
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Other impacts include the use of Forty Voices stories in Welsh Women’s Aid training, and the Bawso Stories work helping to improve survivor wellbeing and changing curatorial practice at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales.
Projects such as Forty Voices, Bawso Stories, and Listening is a Big Step, led by Associate Professor Sarah Wallace, have had significant impact on knowledge and understanding for policymakers and service providers, informing practice and policy in health and social care, Violence Against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (VAWDASV), and crime and justice.
Their research has also led to enhanced education and training in these areas, including providing training to hundreds of frontline health and social care professionals in the use of story.
Ongoing projects are focusing on how housing quality, access to green spaces, employment stability, and local pollution levels shape community wellbeing; as well as embedding storytelling-based citizen engagement into local health and social care policy and decision-making processes.
Co-Creating Spaces of Change is a collaborative action-research programme, exploring how access to university provision can be enabled for service users. Outcomes from this pilot included a documented 30% boost in participants’ self-reported wellbeing, and confidence to engage with services.