The Social Fabric Initiative: art and design for wellbeing

The Social Fabric initiative is a platform for collaboration between design, art and mental health users and professionals to champion better spaces for wellbeing.  Our mission is to test and build an evidence base for positive impacts of art and design on mental and emotional health, and to support those who wish to respond to these design challenges. Through a series of events, interventions, lectures and research, Social Fabric aims to explore this work.

Dragon Cafe: The Handmade Recovery 

​For the first Social Fabric campaign, TYMO donated tired wing chairs from the healthcare environment for a collaboration to highlight the importance of creativity in mental health recovery. Providing vibrant one-off prints and a series of workshops at London-based charity, Dragon Cafe, TYMO worked with patrons to take the chairs from 'tired to inspired' in aid of the popular Dragon Cafe programme.

​Charity Mental Fight Club's flagship project, The Dragon Cafe, was developed 'by mental health service users for mental health service users' and provides imaginative events 'for people of all mental experience'.  It welcomes more than 200 regular participants to its creative London hub in Southwark every week. The project is supported by the Guys & St Thomas' Charity and Maudsley Charity which allows it to host a day long programme of free drop in workshops, as well as affordable, nutritious food and a rotating evening programme of free, high quality creative activities and events every Monday. In 2015 it was added to the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund.

 To learn more about Dragon Cafe and its events follow @thedragoncafe on twitter or go to http://dragoncafe.co.uk. 
For more information about Social Fabric initiatives, click here. ​Photos Liz Gorman www.lizgormanphotography.co.uk