Update Summer 2024: Wave arts club is taking a break after running for 6 years. We hope to be able to offer a free, creative group to support young people and their well-being in the future. Please email us at office@intraarts.org if you would be interested in a group like this.
Intra Arts is a place to escape to, somewhere safe that makes you feel more like yourself and allows you to reset or get respite from the world. We’re certain of the important roles that art and kindness play in tackling health and wellbeing challenges, as we see this at work every day. Making people feel welcome and relaxed at our venue is one of our priorities, for everyone who walks through the door.
Our ‘Wave’ arts club aims to provide a safe space for young people aged 15 to 24 who are at raised risk of suicide and self harm, to socialise and feel understood. The activities they do are a lot of fun and something to focus on, but most important is the time they spend together ‘feeling normal for a couple of hours’, as they describe it. Creative activities just make that easier.
We’ve been playing with screen printed thermochromic inks that change colour with heat. We love it when the group requests activities like this, and we try to offer any craft technique that group members suggest. For example: working with tie dye, Fimo, glass etching fluid, shrink plastic, making digitally cut vinyl stickers, creating jewellery etc. Pieces made often include mental health messages and reminders for self care.
Wave was funded in 2023 by the Test Bed Fund via Medway Voluntary Action (MVA), many thanks to them for their vital help. We are also grateful to the funders who have supported us since Wave’s beginnings in 2018: Kent & Medway Sustainability and Transformation Plan (STP), Rochester Riverside Community Board (twice) and Kent & Medway STP Saving Lives Suicide Prevention Innovation Fund who awarded us funding three times as part of their Legacy Fund.
The group has felt quite a sense of achievement from screen printing T-shirts with their own designs, making vinyl sticker drawings for a high street window display, and creating zines on all sorts of topics. But there’s no pressure to do any particular activity, and the group can request art supplies and equipment for them to get creative with however they like. We have a tablet on hand to play music, and the group members line up the songs they want to play and save them to a Wave playlist. And they chat, with topics sometimes touching on their more difficult experiences, but it could be about gaming, Disneyland, politics, horses, skateboarding or tattoos.
If you or someone you know would benefit from joining Wave, please get in touch. Anyone based in Kent, aged 15 – 24, and who is at risk of suicide or self harming is welcome to join us. They can be referred by a parent, friend, care professional, or themselves. There’s a simple sign up form (mostly contact details, food preferences / allergies, and basic details of any conditions they have if they want to share this), and on returning that to us they’ll be sent dates for the group. We meet twice monthly, one evening and one weekend day.
Please also get in touch if you run something along similar lines with young people, we’d love to hear from you. Please email office@intraarts.org
Thank you to Rochester Riverside for the write up about Wave on their website.
Intra Arts 