Wooden Hill UK Ltd. A social enterprise providing bespoke training and theatre

Vena

In 2006 having worked with the Social Work and Performing Arts departments of the University of Bedfordshire on separate projects for some time, we suddenly realised the potential of bringing the two disciplines together and 4 years later we’re still doing it.

In year 1 Third Year Performing Arts students worked closely with young trainers at Wooden Hill, skill swapping and training and planning together.

The final result was a day of training for Social Work degree students based around the Moon Watcher Media / Wooden Hill co-production Unbeatable.

The social workers watched the film, the actors recreated the characters from it and young trainers facilitated sessions in which the events in the film were changed through social work intervention. The feedback was fantastic and students, lecturers and trainers ended up presenting the results at a

series of conferences up and down the country, finishing at the House of Commons.

In years 2 and 3 an additional level to the project was developed based on representing the experiences of mental health service users and culminating in a live theatrical performance kicking off the training day. In 2010 we are continuing the existing work and extending Project Vena into the Health arena.

This will involve delivering sessions to student nurses exploring working with children and young people in an interactive way through the actors, developing empathy, testing approaches in a safe environment and bringing a very real context to their learning. We will also be working in Milton Keynes with their health and social care transformation programme to ensure service users are central to the process through consultation and theatrical presentation, then developing a safe environment for staff to explore the future of services in a creative way.

The lessons learnt through Project Vena and the tools developed have started to bleed through into many areas of Wooden Hill’s work from performances to conferences to training and we look forward to its continued development in the coming years.