Mondays Like Sundays – WithCare.art

MONDAYS like SUNDAYS

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Mondays like Sundays: Community for Arts-Based Mental Health Facilitators

To be able to create a structure for arts-based community mental health facilitators to come together, work together and support one another. To counteract the isolation, alienation, and precariousness in the context of the work we do. To, in the absence of structural support, create a supportive community resource based in care and collaboration.

Primary Project Leader

Maitri Gopalakrishna

Project initiator and facilitator

Group Members

Padmalatha Ravi, Sri Vamsi Matta, Aruna Manjunath, Yuthika Subramanyan, Arjun Khera, Shilok Mukkati, Sannidhi Surop, Pallavi Chander, Mohini Singh, Madhu Shukla, Vijji Chari, Debosmita Dam, Anirban Ghosh, Vishnu Nambiar

Expanded Summary:

Arts-based community mental health facilitators refer to someone who has honed skills in facilitating arts processes with community groups towards the goals of mental health support. These facilitators could be arts therapists, artists, community workers, teaching artists, applied artists and more. In India, as in many parts of the world, this is not a single profession or an organised field. Most of us have come into this work through practice, some formal or informal training and an enduring conviction that the arts are for everyone and are a powerful tool of expression and communication. In many cases, the contexts in which we do this work are economically, socially and politically precarious. There is little structural support for this work in India. The art world here sees our work as not art enough. The mental health world as not mental health enough. The development world as not too ambiguous and the social justice world as not activism enough. Thus, many of us tend to do this work in isolation, feeling alienated in many allied professional spaces. The world becomes hard to sustain and our own care suffers.

In response to this context, I became interested in how to be able to do this work in community. In 2021 and opportunity arose for me to be part of the Mindscapes Initiative of the Wellcome Trust (UK). I proposed a project called Conversations in Drama where a group of practitioners would run separate arts-based community mental health engagements in different parts of the city of Bangalore for different groups over the course of one year. In parallel the practitioner group of thirteen would meet monthly to discuss plans, problem solve and importantly, play together. These monthly meetings became a vibrant, joyful and supportive space. While I took the responsibility of scheduling, finding a venue and facilitating the meeting, the meetings tended to follow an organic, free flowing coregulated format.

We closed the Mindscapes groups in November of 2022. Some members of the group felt the need to create a platform for this work and so founded The Foundation for Arts and Health India in 2023. FAHI builds more work, develops research and strenghtens capacity in the area of the arts and health.

The Unexpected:

This community gave us some negotiating power with spaces, funders etc. It also seemed to intimidate the institutional partner who had assumed that I would be working with them as an independent practitioner. So, it became clear that there was power in a collective.

How wonderful it was to do this work with and in community. There was a sense of care that each of us could derive. Struggles and successes in the work were brought to the community. Sundays like Mondays also became a place to grapple with issues like caste and our own relationship with it.

The fact that we came back to this community regularly and reported on our work also kept the quality of the work high. It also allowed for ethical issues to be raised and grappled with.

Competition kills collaboration and in this work competition is unhealthy. In Sundays for Mondays we had no competition for resources or recognition. We kept all decisions including financial ones transparent. Control kills care. It is important for the one that initiates or takes on larger responsibility to not try and control the work of the collaborators .

Competition kills collaboration and in this work competition is unhealthy.

— Maitri Gopalakrishna

OUTCOMES:

• A strong community or practitioners that support one another

• New collaborations and projects

• Developing structural support for the work

• More efficacious and ethical work

• Developing language to document and communicate our work to those in other allied fields and beyond

Questions:

What questions did this project call attention to about what is needed to support the care and wellbeing of artists or communities in need of care?

Were there new learnings or an affirmation of past learnings?

CONSIDERATIONS:

This project deeply affirmed the importance of community as a care resource for arts-based community mental health practitioners. These communities are hard to come by and so it fell on us to create it for ourselves. It is possible and relatively easy to create these communities but some considerations (not exhaustive) to ensure it is supportive and a care resource.

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1. Transparency of decision making (including financials)

2. Non-competition—at no point should there be a sense of competition for resources or recognition. Collaboration and mutual dependency must be encouraged and sustained

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3. Encourage processes of co-creation but offer autonomous space for individual styles and creativity to shine. In Mondays like Sundays, each project facilitation team had autonomy over what they did in their groups.

4. Trust is earned so take time and put effort into getting to know each other.

5. Watch out for control