Key words: creative engagement, participatory arts, health and wellbeing, mental health
People Speak Up uses creative engagement to tackle isolation, improve health, and build community in Llanelli and Carmarthen, proving that the arts are a frontline service.
People Speak Up is a Llanelli-based arts and health organisation founded in 2017 by Eleanor Shaw. What began as a small group of community members learning to tell their own stories has grown into a thriving wellbeing hub at the Zion Chapel in Llanelli, with a further presence at the Living Well Centre in Carmarthen. With a core team of five, 25 freelancers, and 15 volunteers, they work with people who are isolated, vulnerable, or living with health challenges, helping them reconnect with themselves and their communities through storytelling, music, movement, and visual art.
The impact is tangible and wide-reaching. One participant went from 16 medications to 9 after engaging with the programme; another rediscovered a childhood love of the piano; a cancer and ataxia survivor who had lost her voice went on to speak at a Social Care Forum and write a memoir. In 2024, People Speak Up recorded 7,000 attendances across their programmes, representing 3,000 individual people. Referrals come from GPs, social workers, partner organisations, and families and friends, and people can be matched with artists for home visits if they are unable to leave the house.
People Speak Up demonstrates that the arts are not peripheral to health and wellbeing, they are central to it. Despite operating in a sector that is chronically underfunded, the organisation has built a model that is responsive, human, and genuinely co-produced, meeting people where they are and trusting them to know what they need. Creative engagement, they prove, is not a nice-to-have. It is a frontline service.
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