Launched in September 2020 at the University of Toronto Scarborough, FLOURISH: Community-Engaged Arts for Social Wellness is an arts-led, community-engaged multimodal initiative that explores how creative arts engagement enriches social connection and wellness across the lifecourse.

We support the development of community-engaged arts-wellness initiatives across Scarborough and the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). In partnership with locally-engaged organizations we seek to produce meaningful evidence that reflects how high-quality arts experiences—in multiple forms, venues and roles—catalyze interactions crucial to social wellness.

We are an assemblage of academics — faculty and students from various fields— as well as community members, artists, and activists. Sometimes some of us are all of these: what we all share in common is our commitment to looking at the ways arts, wellness, and community are interconnected and make our lived experiences better.  

FLOURISH is a collection of distinct, yet resonant research and creative  projects that have a shared vision: to demonstrate the ways community-engaged creative arts engagement is an impactful intervention for enhancing social connection and wellness. In contrast to traditional, often clinical, definitions of “wellness” each of our Cluster’s contributing projects prioritize the meaningful outcomes of arts engagement as defined by a community.

How we do it.

Leading with and learning from the assets of our community partners, we aim to assist the growth of an intergenerational culture of wellness through the arts—locally, provincially, and nationally. Through research, collaborations, training opportunities, and advisory relationships, FLOURISH seeks to advance our understanding of creative arts engagement as an impactful method for enhancing social wellness: for the further benefit of health and social services, the arts and culture sector, and society.

Ruha Benjamin, in her book Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, argues for the benefits of microvision of change – what she terms plotting: “little by little, day by day, starting in our own backyards, let’s identify our plots, get to the root cause of what’s ailing us, accept our interconnectedness, and finally grow.” She goes on to explain that “whether digging deep or sowing seeds far and wide, plotting is about questioning the scripts you’ve been handed and scheming with others to do and be otherwise for the collective good of all.” It is about acknowledging your abilities and interests and using them to help yourself and others in your backyard, while knowing that your backyard is connected to a larger street, that street to a neighborhood, and so on,  so that you might help to produce a less harmful world. 

At FLOURISH, we are a group of individuals and organizations tilling our plots, but working with each other whenever needed, lending each other tools, watering each other’s soil, and offering each other whatever else kind of support is needed.

As an institutionally sanctioned organization, we understand that  many of our  supporting institutions and therefore us, in some capacity,  have participated and continue to participate in the oppression of others. Universities have typically been exclusionary and a site of oppression for many. For instance, the University of Toronto operates on what has traditionally been for thousands of years and continues to be the land  of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississauga’s of the Credit. However, beyond the now conventional land acknowledgement, the University of Toronto has not authentically participated in land back initiatives. We attempt to rectify this, in our own small way, by being  community based and community lead and by redistributing funds where possible.

Who we are.

The “we” here is slippery. Some of us are academics, from undergraduates, to graduate students, to post-doctoral fellows, to assistant professors, part-time and sessional and tenured professors. Others of us are community members who work outside of academia and within our communities. Others of us are artists with and without institutional support, and some of us are medical practitioners.  Yet, many of us take on all of these roles, and show up in certain ways depending on what is needed of us or how we feel like embodying space. The “we” here is expansive, because we are always looking for co-conspirators to join us in this work. The “we” here is never complete, because we believe in being accessible and accessibility demands, among other elements, flexibility and open endedness. We have a creative, inclusive idea of who is a researcher and we do not gate keep.

Why We Do What We Do.

Although many of us in FLOURISH would consider ourselves activists, we hope that as a collective we are more inline with organizer values.  Abolitionist Mariame Kaba, in her article “Everything Worthwhile is Done with Other People,” notes that

activist is super broad, and that’s why people call people activists. Your individual action, for example, of writing can be a form of activism in the sense that it wants to educate people and get them to take action in their own way. You are in that way potentially being activist in your orientation, at least, if not in identity…

Organizers, however, can’t exist solo…If you’re organizing, other people are counting on you, but, more importantly, your actions are accountable to somebody else. Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are. It requires being focused on power, and figuring out how to build power to push your issues, in order to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.

Therefore, although we agree with Kaba that “most organizers are activists,” and see the value in activism, we understand that as a collective that is institutionally supported, we can push back at greater levels when working collectively and when we offer our support to activists. We also understand that when the boundary between the sciences and the arts are blurred, new visions, new strategies, new ways of creating and existing — new forms of wellness —  are made possible hence we aim to be organizers.