Our Creative Minds (CM) Artists deliver art sessions to many types of venue such as care homes, schools, learning disability services, days centres and many more. Reaching a diverse range of clientele is important to us in achieving our social aims, empowering people through our service and making art accessible to all.
Our art sessions allow people to express themselves through the creative process, explore various art mediums and art forms and experiment with a huge variety of techniques and processes.
Whilst working as a Support Worker at a learning disability service James started delivering 1-to-1 art sessions to a gentleman with severe learning and physical disabilities. He noticed how engaging the activity was for him and how he enjoyed expressing himself through the use of various art mediums.
James felt incredibly inspired by these sessions and on 12th November 2012 he founded Creative Minds and started contacting learning disability services and care homes.
Within a short space of time James was delivering art sessions to around 20 clients, most of whom were older people in care homes.
Creative Minds started to gain traction and received some fantastic publicity in various magazines and publications and in Autumn 2014 James was awarded the Care Innovator Award at the Great British Care Awards.
James' vision had always been to expand Creative Minds across the country and in late 2014 we started franchising to enable artists to replicate our proven business model in their localities.
In Summer 2015 Creative Minds was awarded the Solutions for an Ageing Society award from UnLtd and the Coutts Foundation, providing James with crucial business and financial support to help him grow Creative Minds further.
Artists from across the UK became interested in joining us and Creative Minds started to grow very quickly, reaching more and more older people and various types of clientele.
In 4 years Creative Minds had grown into a vibrant community of over 40 artists from across the country delivering fun and therapeutic art sessions to people young and old.