Access Alliance Arts for Family Health
By Jasmine Sidhu
Introducing the Arts for Family Health Digital platform
On January 20, Access Alliance hosted the official virtual launch of the Arts for Family Health digital platform. The webinar brought together funders, staff, leadership, project teams, partner organizations, students, and community members to reflect on the role of expressive arts to improve health and well-being. It marked an important milestone in the organization’s efforts to demonstrate the arts as a meaningful and effective approach to supporting newcomer family health.
The launch created space to honour more than two decades of arts-based practice at Access Alliance, while also inviting reflection on how this new platform can strengthen learning, collaboration, and sustainability across the organization and beyond.
Rooted in community and shared knowledge
The webinar opened with a land acknowledgement recognizing the traditional lands of the Huron-Wendat, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas of the Credit. This recognition shapes both Access Alliance’s work and the platform itself, including relational learning, storytelling, and intergenerational knowledge sharing.
From the outset, the platform was described as a living resource rather than an archive of information. It builds on more than twenty years of arts-based practice within Access Alliance and the ongoing work of the Hubs of Expressive Arts for Life (HEAL) Project. The platform was co-created with staff, service providers, participants, and community partners to ensure that its tools are practical and culturally responsive.
Speakers emphasized the platform emerged from internal conversations across teams and disciplines. It was intentionally designed as a shared meeting ground where program experience, research, and creative practice can merge in accessible and adaptable ways.
Arts in health, organizational sustainability
A key focus of the webinar is advocating for arts to improve family health by addressing and preventing family violence. Art integration is especially critical because it offers an intergenerational approach to healing that extends beyond individuals extending to meet whole communities. Session speakers emphasized expressive arts can be tailored to all ages: children, caregivers, elders, and families where they can process experiences together, strengthening relational bonds and collective resilience.
There is ample evidence internationally that recognizes the role of arts impacting the social determinants of health. 2019, a report published by the World Health Organization (WHO) found that engagement with the arts can prevent and manage illness. As a result it can support mental and physical well-being and reducing health inequities across the life course. Arts is more than a therapeutic tool, but a public health approach that supports long-term community wellness, cultural continuity, and sustainable systems of care.
Sustainability was discussed as both a structural and intellectual consideration. Structurally, speakers reflected on the importance of embedding arts-based roles within interdisciplinary teams, programs, and care systems. Intellectually, sustainability was described as ensuring that learning, tools, and evidence remain accessible and usable over time. The Arts for Family Health digital platform is fostering Access Alliance’s visibility in contributing to the growing evidence of arts in health.
What will you find on the platform? During the webinar, participants were guided through the platform and its core sections.
Together, these sections support internal learning, cross-team knowledge sharing, and ongoing collaboration.
Built through collaboration at Access Alliance
The platform was developed alongside Ilana Wilner and her team at Launchbox. Key supportive members include Marco Campana (social action and knowledge mobilization coordinator), Heather Corbin (communications officer), Lana Cho (community health worker), and HEAL research fellows. Placement students and volunteer provided additional support. Its innovative to receive funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) to fund a creative care platform to address and prevent family violence specifically for newcomer communities.
Throughout the webinar, sustainability was discussed as an ongoing organizational commitment shaped by partnership, advocacy, and continued learning. The platform reflects this approach by remaining open, free, accessible, responsive, and designed to grow alongside Access Alliance’s evolving work.
A research fellow’s reflection
As the final research fellow for the HEAL Project, this platform resonates not only as a shared organizational resource, but as a reflection of the field I have worked in and care deeply about. My experience working with gender-based violence and intimate partner violence has consistently shown that harm is rarely experienced in isolation. It unfolds within families, across relationships, and over time. As a result, it affects families across generations in ways that individual-focused interventions alone cannot fully address.
What is meaningful about this platform is its commitment to an intergenerational and relational approach to healing. In GBV and IPV contexts, children, caregivers, and extended family members are often impacted even when they are not the direct recipients of services. Arts-based approaches create space for expression, meaning-making, and connection that can hold this complexity, allowing families to engage with healing in ways that feel safer, more accessible, and culturally responsive.
From both a research and practice perspective, the platform reflects a broader shift within the field toward prevention, sustainability, and knowledge sharing. The tools, stories, and resources gathered here demonstrate how arts-based work can move beyond time-limited projects to become woven within systems of care. For those working in violence prevention, trauma recovery, and family health, I recommend taking a look at the many concrete examples of how expressive arts can support trauma healing, reduce isolation, and strengthen community-based responses to harm.
For me, this platform represents both continuity and possibility. It honours the depth of work already underway at Access Alliance, while also contributing to ongoing conversations in the field about how we support families and communities affected by violence in ethical, evidence-informed, and care-rooted ways.
An invitation to explore
The Arts for Family Health digital platform represents a shared organizational resource and a foundation for continued learning at Access Alliance. It reflects the collective knowledge, creativity, and commitment of staff, partners, and community members who have contributed to arts-based work over many years.
At the heart of this work is a belief that art, learning, and care can and should be shared to strengthen the families and communities we serve.
