Lived Experience

Why Is Collaborative Creativity So Powerful in Making Change Happen?

Social action is about taking steps to make a positive difference to our community or environment. 

As the former Creative Director at Effervescent, I spent five years working alongside Co-op Foundation and young people from across the UK to destigmatise young people’s loneliness.  Our combined approach was to resource, support and champion children, teenagers and young adults who have lived experience of loneliness.  By working side-by-side to create campaigns aimed at other people experiencing loneliness, we saw profound change not only in the young people we worked with directly, but in how young people across the UK feel about this complex and hard-to-discuss experience. 

 In this article, I’ll explore why collaborative creative social action with young people who have lived experience of a phenomenon is so powerful in effecting change.

Let’s start with lived experience.

Everyone had very unique ideas, and our campaign idea is a whole mix of them: I’m really proud of what we’ve come up with. It made me appreciate what working in a team can achieve because I could never have developed any one of those ideas alone as well as we did in groups. No one person was responsible for any idea: they were all a result of our collective imagination and collaboration, which feels really special.  Often our ideas went down a path I had never even considered, but they turned out to be really important, and resonated with all of our team’s experiences of loneliness. – Helen, 21, 2021

What is lived experience?

The idea of lived experience stems from the philosopher Heidegger, who was interested in how we make sense of our lives.   The crucial idea is that some things that happen to us, or situations we live in or live through, are so profound, so deep, and so visceral that they shape our lives, our bodies, the way we think, the way we experience everything that happens around us: we literally ‘live’ that experience. Heidegger’s work was mainly written in the first half of the twentieth century; discoveries around epigenetic trauma and post-traumatic stress in the early twenty-first century have highlighted the brain and DNA science that supports Heidegger’s ideas.

These lived experiences fuel the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are therefore capable of achieving - or enduring.  Because they are so deeply embedded in who we are and what we believe, we often don’t notice them; the same way we are rarely conscious of our own heartbeat.

Lived experience is about ways of deeply knowing.  Importantly, we don’t always know what we know, because it is so buried in who we are; it’s fused into our biology and biochemistry.  In the West, we have traditionally separated mind from body, and historically believed that people think in their heads.  Recent research has demonstrated that, in fact, we synthesise information from our senses, hearts and even our stomachs (‘gut instinct’): this is embodied knowledge.  Thanks to quantum physics, we also now understand much more about how people connect at a cellular level, and the effect observation has on changing very fundamentally what is being looked at.  Through systems thinking we understand that nobody exists in a vacuum – we all exist in complex relationships.

This is important - it’s crucial - because so much youth work, education, youth consultation, focus grouping, co-production, and development work with children and young people is still carried out through processes that ask them to say things, prioritise things, and work through words and writing as individuals, or whilst being observed and recorded by adults. Much more can be achieved through physical sensory exploration - play, art, drama, dance, music - and collective experiments in making things happen, and reflecting on the results as a collective. 

Why is social action by young people with lived experience so important?

In Western culture, we often tell our children fairytales. In fairytales, bad things happen to the most wonderful of people, and they often overcome them through magic or sheer hard work and live more happily. 

Young people and children who have experienced unusual, traumatic, and complex situations or environments often have very passionate beliefs that other people shouldn’t have to go through what they’ve gone through.  If you’ve experienced misfortune, cruelty, and misery, it’s natural to want to protect other people from those things. 

If you behave differently to your peers as a response to those difficulties, you may be labelled a problem: an inconvenience to the system.

With social action projects, young people who have often been viewed as problems in the system - the ones who act out, and need to be ‘managed’ - have an opportunity to be heard, and to channel what they know and feel into something that’s useful to others, and helps them to get a hold on the thing that’s had a hold on them.

This has given me the hope of doing something positive, meeting new people who I immediately felt a connection with, and creating something incredible. It's the first piece of excitement and happiness in a long while, and I found myself so inspired by everyone and everything we were doing.   - Josie, 20, 2019

Social action is also a way of beginning to accept that we didn’t cause every bad thing that happened to us.  It’s easy to blame ourselves; so many systems or individuals will make us believe we’re causing the problem, and we are the problem. When young people meet others facing similar pain and challenges, it’s easier to believe – just as we can see they are incredible humans dealing with impossible situations – that maybe it’s not a failing in us, but a fault in our stars. 

With the young people involved in Lonely Not Alone, the profound learning experience within the group was that every person there had experienced loneliness, and was also adorable: funny, witty, wise, kind… It helped us realise that if we were lonely, we weren’t alone in that, and it wasn’t the case that something was wrong with us – we just hadn’t found our tribes yet.

Knowing that people from my age range actually feel lonely is mind blowing. Mainly because young people are not associated with loneliness. So, it’s like…wait, other people also feel the same way I do? Then you’re building like a bridge between you and them even though you might not be able to see them, you start to build a little connection, so it feels like a community. – Elorm, 16, 2020

Social action with a group of peers helps people facing complex experiences make sense of them, have compassion for themselves rather than blaming themselves.  It helps them learn transferable skills; have meaningful experiences that help them feel validated rather than blamed; and take the part of the fairy godmother, rather than always being cast as the wicked witch or the unkissable toad.  

It’s built my confidence up massively – especially the workshops.  Feeling really vulnerable - but ok in that vulnerability – has been positive.  Being surrounded by people who understand how I felt was so good for me. – Dani, 20

Why is social action by young people with lived experience so valuable for catalysing social change?

In Western society, so much power lies with people who are privileged, white, middle-class, middle-aged.  The creative industries are dominated by people who had the connections and wealth to get a foot in the door; they could live at home without paying rent while growing their creative career. Politics and policy-making is dominated by people with privileged backgrounds.  Consequently, decisions about social policy, how to communicate urgent health and social wellbeing messages, and how to design services for structurally disadvantaged people are often made by people with no experience of living with those issues. 

When someone doesn’t engage with a service, or follow health advice, because it has no relatable connection to their reality, they are often blamed for their own continuing disadvantage or failure to succeed.

Research has demonstrated that the more communities grow apart and become polarised in wealth, health, happiness, and social satisfaction, the more the whole societal system suffers. Social action by people who have lived experience is, therefore, incredibly valuable to other people like them and to the well-being of everyone.

How do you unearth lived experience if it’s unsayable?

We’ve established that it’s valuable for people with lived experience of painful and isolating situations, such as loneliness, to share their knowledge with each other and with the wider world.  We’ve also recognised that traditional methods of researching what people know – such as asking them in a focus group, or one-to-one interview – can bypass valuable deeper knowledges held in the body or amongst a ‘wise crowd’ of people who may not know each other, but have all lived different versions of a unifying experience. 

How, then, can we access the insight that helps us communicate with, connect with, and create a way forward for people who have been structurally silenced? 

For my practice, the answer is play - and critically engaged creative practice.  By ‘critically engaged’, I mean proposing a sequence of tasks, where the group offers creative responses to a stimulus question such as, create an experience using sound and one other sensory element, that describes what xxx feels like. I often do this by dividing the group into two or more teams so that each experience has a set of creators, and a set of audiences.  Once everyone has experienced each other’s work, we use Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Technique to critically analyse:

·       What happened?

·       What did it make me feel?

·       What did I understand about xxx from that?

·       What did it remind me of?

·       How did it achieve that? 

By ‘play’, I mean freely utilising materials, props, technical equipment (the theatre smoke machines are very popular!), random things we find, and our own bodies to conjure up and play out responses to these stimulus questions.  As we reflect on what we make, we also reflect on how we feel about what we make and why it does that to us.  Once we’ve logged all that information and stuck it to the wall, we go again: we divide into a different set of groups and undertake a new thematic task using new props, new materials, new locations.  Gradually, over cycles of collective play and creation, we find the metaphors, ideas, and hidden scraps of information that are buried deep within our collective subconscious as a group...and we stick them on the wall so that everyone can see and make collective sense of the insight we are collating.

The vocabulary of play is particularly apposite because ‘playing’ doesn’t suggest that the aim is to be correct; the only principle is to join in and feel free to let go of hierarchies or outside pressure. And creativity is useful, because artistic practice is about finding the most arresting, simple, clear expression for a truth. 

Once we have enough information on the wall to begin a sifting and selection process, we work as a group through the most pertinent and important phrases, images, and exchanges that have appeared and start to boil them down to simple metaphors, propositions, and concepts.

Audiences find empathic connections and resonance in art works and creativity

It will be such an amazing and beautiful thing to see people come together and speak about the topic, and be able to help another person. It’s about just coming together and even though a lonely person might not want to put themselves out there immediately, they can acknowledge it, they can move on a bit, and still feel a bit better knowing that even if they’re lonely, a hundred million people feel the same way; it’s not just them.  – Alima, 19

Play is the natural language of children and young people; it’s how they communicate and make sense of the world.  Child psychotherapist Donald Winnicott found that children load some objects with powerful associations and stories, which last into adulthood: the mere sight or smell of them can produce formidable emotions and thoughts.  If we can find those shared symbols and objects, we can help other people find comfort, joy, understanding, and empathy with children and young people living profound and intense experiences such as loneliness.

Cultural theorist Lynn Froggett has refined this idea for the community art world with her concept of the aesthetic third.  The aesthetic third is an artwork or artefact that is neither me nor you, but sits between us, a powerful symbol of what we share and know about a specific subject.  It’s important, because in much social action work, young people end up in documentaries telling their personal stories; which runs the dual risk of ‘othering’ them for sympathy, not empathy in the minds of an audience; and also trapping the young person in that identity long after the project is finished – especially if the documentary work ends up on the internet. 

When we work together to create beautiful experiences, powerful symbols, and visceral moments for audiences, the audiences are invited to play, too. Powerful, emotive experiences create profound change and long-lasting presence in audiences’ minds – in the advertising world, benchmarking has shown that the most emotionally engaging and uniquely memorable work reaps a long-lasting impact on audience behaviour in a way that factual adverts don’t get near – emotional campaigns are almost twice as effective. It turns out, harnessing children’s natural language of play is the most powerful way to create change in the world.

© Bella Day 2021.