Theme for 2026: Critical Hope

Our national festival of Creative Health: Creativity and Wellbeing Week is an amazing platform to champion, celebrate creative health across the country. This year our festival theme is “Critical Hope” (for acute times). “Critical hope” reflects the ability to realistically assess the environment through a lens of equity and justice while also envisioning the possibility of a better future. Championed as an idea by Paulo Freire, “critical hope” is an active, necessary, and realistic, rather than passive or naive, stance against oppression and despair, deeply rooted in his work Pedagogy of Hope.

We will have a range of curated events – free to attend, some online webinars, some commissions for events to support artists and practitioners to share their work during the week and of course, lots of stories, blogs and content about the amazing work happening across the sector.