Creative Recovery in the 'Shire

In March this year, Aberdeenshire Community Recovery hosted our fellow recovery group, Creative Recovery Inverclyde, from Greenock, up showing us how Inverclyde does creative recovery in their community. There were 7 members of Inverclyde came up to the Wellbeing Hub in Huntly, and the first night was a video of small clips and videos of what recovery means to them and what they have been doing to get creative and at one with nature. We had a chippy tea which was well received by all of the 35 people who attended the Monday night.

Next day it was creative writing, and I was blown away how creative I could be, with the right guidance. We all got an opportunity to share our pieces of writing and everyone enjoyed everyone else’s - not a bad piece was found. We also got the opportunity to make a mini magazine [Zine] this was also really interesting and fun to do.

Wednesday was an introduction to film making, my personal favourite session. We split into 2 tables of 8 or 10. Each of us had to draw a scene pertaining to the prompt-word we were given. My word was coffee so I drew a café scene with 2 people drinking coffee in the café. Then you had to pass your paper to the person on your left. They then had to draw something pertaining to the last picture drawn. This could sometimes be quite hard and especially because you only had a certain amount of time to draw in. Once all the pictures had been drawn you had to stand up and tell your story according to the pictures. Some were brilliant and a lot of fun to do.

In the afternoon we did creative movement and dance. I was dreading this but, again, a lot of fun and it’s amazing what you can do if you let yourself go and get lost in movement and music.

Thursday saw us say good bye to our friends, but not before they tucked into a nice healthy brunch to set them up on there long way home.

Deveron Projects helped set up the connections with Inverclyde and were part of the events. During the week Aberdeenshire Community Recovery provided lunch and refreshments and always fresh fruit, so thank you ARC for giving us all the opportunity to see what others are doing and hopefully we can take our new found skills and practise them. We hope to continue collaborating with the Inverclyde Group over the year to come.