North Lanarkshire's (NL) ambitious aim for regeneration includes reshaping and repopulating its town centres as places of creativity and enterprise to support economic growth. This involves developing a sense of place by protecting or redeveloping vacant priority buildings, and providing 'Super Hubs' to support integrated delivery of public services including lifelong learning, housing, third sector & adult care facilities, police & community safety initiatives, business & employment. The high-level strategic plan for NL highlights shared priorities across sectors, focusing on aspects of the human condition to significantly improve the quality of life & wellbeing of people who want to live, learn, work, invest in and visit the locality. The arts and humanities, however, are absent from this vision. While Covid-19 has emphasised the need for accessible arts provision across NL, particularly for marginalised groups, there is no formal arts strategy. This is concerning as NL has the 4th largest population of Scotland's 32 authorities & the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation reports increases in deprivation. This collaboration builds on existing research - the Measuring Humanity research programme 'measuring' health and inequalities through creativity and connectivity - at the University of Edinburgh (UoE) - to: -co-produce a long-term, sustainable and 'measurable' Arts/Creative Communities strategic plan for NL with community members, including marginalised groups, and key stakeholders in health, education, business & employability, social justice & community safety that is integrated and aligned with other sectors' priorities -connect NL's departments, schools and grassroots organisations to ensure sustained access to the arts from early years through to healthy ageing -implement a social prescribing model to support the health & wellbeing of NL communities through the arts and humanities -identify assets (building, cultural, human resources, communities' knowledge & aspirations) that will contribute to a sustainable regeneration plan devised with constituents -implement a dignity and access fund for lower income households or those facing barriers in accessing the arts -develop a co-produced, multi-sectoral template for other local authorities' Arts/Creative Communities departments to apply/adapt/feed into national policies in Scotland & England The UoE will work with key national, regional and local partners (Scottish Communities Safety Network, Youth Theatre Arts Scotland; NL Enterprise & Communities; Community Learning & Development; NL Head of Education; NL Education & Families Social Work Service; NHS Lanarkshire and the Tron Theatre). We will apply the Measuring Humanity framework in various settings using participatory and arts-informed initiatives to connect with marginalised groups/other community members/partners across the lifespan: -early years education: Creative Consultation; Arts Pop Ups; Future Fridays & Primary Pathways in Schools -healthy aging: interactive 'Silent Disco' workshops with adults in care homes/living with dementia -community safety/social justice: musicBox to gather experiences of community safety and empower communities to capture stories using meaningful creative, community-based tools -creative consortiums: implement a mapping exercise of creative assets in NL to connect partners and create sustainable employment, education and improved quality of life opportunities linked to a social prescribing pathway Community members will create an interactive, non-digital map (treasure trail) to show people how to get to arts venues; showcase various art-forms; and identify local, cultural assets. We will also pilot an Immersive Taxi Theatre Experiment for marginalised groups, cut off from transport links. The trips will get them to/from arts activities, while capturing meaningful stories about life experiences and turn them into creative podcasts

REALITIES (Researching Evidence-based Alternatives in Living, Imaginative, Traumatised, Integrated, Embodied Systems) is a collective of lived and felt experience community researchers already embedded within three localities in Scotland (Clackmannanshire; Easter Ross in the Highland; and North Lanarkshire); local council representatives; third sector organisations; artists; environmentalists; Scottish national dance, theatre and singing bodies; an executive non-departmental public body of the Scottish Government; and academics from diverse disciplines including health policy; health economics; mental health nursing; counselling, psychotherapy and applied social sciences; new public management; human geography; environmental sociology; design innovation and participatory design; and the arts. Our life experiences, work in communities and research has made us accept that we're part of a fragmented, traumatised system. Guided by Karen Treisman's thinking on organisational trauma, we're seeing the system as the 'client' or 'vulnerable participant' or 'deprived person' with 'lived experience'. Burnt out and suffering from compassion fatigue, the traumatised system polarises people, places and processes. It's crisis driven; avoidant or detached emotionally to cope with insurmountable global inequities. It's chaotic; dysregulated; disconnected. Our multi-site collaboration will co-design and test the scalable REALITIES model - to piece together the fragmented parts of the system to bring about integrated systemic change through conscious and co-ordinated engagement in hyper-local communities - using a multi-faceted approach that connects people, places, processes and power. We'll think differently and creatively about divergent perceptions of reality (ontology); different types of knowledge and evidence (epistemology) in the system (for example, how dance movement can sit alongside a statistical analysis); and we'll explore the ethics of vulnerability (who decides who is and isn't vulnerable and what does this label mean for the so-called vulnerable?). We're also uniting academics from multiple disciplines, who use diverse methodological approaches to analyse health disparities, and bringing them into deep, critical conversations about data, methods, theories and analysis. The REALITIES model will take us towards methodological convergence (or help us find ways to integrate methodological divergence) that situates participatory, arts-informed, creative-relational, (post)-qualitative approaches alongside positivist, scientific approaches in the evidence-base. In summary, our team will: i) facilitate cross-partner collaborations in three localities - Clackmannanshire; Easter Ross; and North Lanarkshire (NL) - to establish multiple, clearly defined asset hubs in these neighbourhoods. The hubs have focus on creatively connecting employability, health and social care (particularly mental health), transport accessibility, community learning and development, and the environment. ii) map and investigate how Integrated Joint Boards in these localities work with non-statutory community groups to connect cultural, natural, social and creative-relational assets to address health disparities; iii) explore how excluded communities in the system - 'The Outliers' - namely prisoners, ex-offenders, refugees and those experiencing homelessness are integrated within statutory and non-statutory services and partnerships in these localities; iv) co-design and explore the new scalable REALITIES model across emergent asset hubs in the three localities to understand how we can collaboratively create healthier communities across Scotland.

We often hear 'the system' is broken, but what do we mean by this? How can changing the way we think about, define, research, evidence, monitor, evaluate and resource 'the system' lead to meaningful change for deprived communities? How will this change benefit those who have first-hand experience of trauma, homelessness, poverty, unemployment, displacement, poor mental health or imprisonment? REALITIES takes a human-systems approach noting 'health and social care systems' (HSCS) are constructed mental representations of relationships existing in the world to promote health for people. Our Scottish consortium of 57 people has five established asset hubs in Clackmannanshire, Dundee, Easter Ross, Edinburgh and North Lanarkshire with strong relationships uniting conflicting ways of seeing the world. Through phase 2, we co-produced a systems-level model with deprived communities, policymakers, practitioners and researchers collecting and respecting different types of knowledge and alternative evidence-bases (from arts performances to nature walks; words to statistics) as equally important to understand complexities of unjust and avoidable health differences. Foundational funding evidenced REALITIES is able to transcend the challenge for our currently imagined HSCS. The medical model of disease shaping who and what is considered to be part of 'the health system' has brought benefits to human existence, though key actors within these place-based HSCS systems understand the limitations of this systems-framing for human flourishing. At present, they don't have a way to help reimagine them. REALITIES provides exploration and method for this reimagining. A model representing collective pathways producing creative routes for people to get the healthcare they need at the right time of their journeys by co-researching and co-creating with them the "what, whom, how, and why" - leading to successful connections between individuals with health and social needs and community-based opportunities for health and wellbeing improvement. We are a transdisciplinary collective of individuals with lived and felt experience of inequalities working alongside policymakers; local authorities; charities; artists; environmentalists and researchers from policy; health humanities; arts; psychology; human geography; environmental sociology; dentistry; medicine; statistics; economics; counselling; psychotherapy; management; medical anthropology; design and innovation. We will: understand what work is needed to enable places to reimagine and build 'systems' that create equitable health and wellbeing. explore and explain how links between creativity, relationships and nature create healthier and more resilient communities and environments for people in deprived areas. support creative, participatory processes, enabling communities to construct shared mental models (systems) using different ways of knowing (epistemologies) and perceiving reality (ontologies). combine different ways of knowing, enabling a more complete representation of bio-psycho-social-political factors which create 'health' and ways in which these are experienced by marginalised people. support communities to construct place-based versions of systems encompassing all aspects of health and wellbeing, and make purposeful changes in the nature of their relationships with each other and their environment. explore the usefulness of 'standard' Health Economic evaluation tools to assess Social Return of Investment, working with communities to re-conceptualise and re-define measures of 'value' and 'quality of life' in relation to human experience.