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Promoting Health and Innovative Health Promotion Practice Through a Community Arts CentreUniversity of Victoria in Victoria, Canada, Promoting Action Toward Health (PATH) project in Victoria, British Columbia
Centre on Aging and Department of Sociology, University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia
Quadra Arts Centre in Victoria, British Columbia The salubrious effects of participation in and exposure to the arts are well documented. This paper describes the development of a unique arts centre established in a disadvantaged urban school setting as part of a larger community-based health promotion research project. The discussion highlights how community-based arts programming may impact health not only through positive effects on "upstream" non-medical health determinants, particularly aspects of social support, but also through its ability to facilitate the more traditional health-promotion initiatives of the larger parent project. Also discussed is this centre's potential to act as a catalyst to achieve the overarching project goal of enhanced community health by building constitutive capacity around positive aspects of the community, rather than focusing on capacity only as an instrumental resource to solve social or health problems. Greater incorporation of the arts within health-promotion projects offers potential to enhance both health promotion practice and outcomes.
Key Words: health promotion community-based arts programs population health social ecology community capacity arts and health
This version was published on October
1, 2007 Health Promotion Practice, Vol. 8, No. 4,
366-374 (2007) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
