François Matarasso

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  • 250 and counting

    Awareness of mental well-being has improved greatly during my lifetime, but there’s still a long way to go before people living with mental difficulties are treated like others in need of care. Partly, perhaps, it’s because mental illness is often experienced by degrees, changeable in its internal and external effects. Like other illnesses, it may…

  • A culture of possibility

    Hope is a contraband Given how things are right now, it feels a bit uncomfortable (and late) to wish readers a Happy New Year, but rituals matter and traditions help keep us afloat in the floods of history. In any case, as we face ecological crisis, pandemic and collapsing political and cultural norms, it seems…

  • Take pride

    In October, I wrote about a community opera being created in County Durham that had been stopped just weeks before its première by the Covid pandemic. The piece had taken more than a year to make in a partnership between professional and non-professional artists and no one was willing to let it go, or wait…

  • Guest blog – Evaluating arts programmes in health care

    Many people have written about evaluating the outcomes of participation in the arts, especially in the past 20 years as funders have been more willing to support the work – if the results they want can be achieved. Most of that writing is by academics and specialists in evaluation but we don’t hear so often…

  • From Regular Marvels: ‘What we talk about when we talk about love’

    ‘You know, while doing this, going through this journey, it has changed me. And, yes, I had a spiritual inkling, but being with them – they taught me what unconditional love is all about. They taught me what being non-judgmental was all about.‘ Alokananda Roy in conversation with the Traction Team, 2 December 2020 In…

  • Understanding community music – can you help?

    About five years ago, a group of musicians and academics set up an international research platform to foster understanding of the social impact of music making. The people involved have decades of commitment to the idea that music can transform people’s life chances. They’ve worked in difficult, sometimes dangerous situations, and published important research that extends and…