Vision: CoolTan Arts believes mental well being is enhanced by the power of creativity.
Mission: CoolTan Arts exists to inspire the well-being and creative participation of a wide range of people through the production of quality art. It is a participant - led organisation, run by and for adults experiencing mental distress, underpinning all its activities with advocacy.
CoolTan Arts Today
CoolTan Arts runs a vibrant arts centre with an Independent Gallery in Southwark’s lively Walworth Road, with a varied programme of creative workshops: visual arts, pod casting, web design, batik, digital arts, video, poetry, sculpture and performing arts. Other activities include public exhibitions, monthly Largactyl Shuffle walks every third Saturday of the month, websites which help break down the stigma of mental distress. CoolTan’s gallery / performance space offers other local community projects somewhere to exhibit. Our volunteering programmes offer meaningful engagement and the opportunity to learn useful skills.
Our participants and volunteers are central to the organisation and all do a fantastic job in helping to run the office and our activities. Volunteers can get involved in many different ways: administration, marketing and media, IT, finance, photographers, film makers, graphic designers, workshop assistants, trustees, mentors, walk leaders for our guided cultural arts walk, the Largactyl Shuffle. |
Aims
CoolTan Arts aims to promote positive mental health, wellbeing, recovery and rehabilitation, bringing about a change in how participants perceive themselves, enabling people to gain greater focus and to re-establish their relationship with society. We aim to offer life long learning and enable people to achieve qualification and accreditation status. We achieve this through quality arts education with professional outcomes such as public exhibitions, and social enterprise principles.
Brief History
CoolTan Arts has existed since 1990 and became a registered charity in 1997.
CoolTan Arts was funded by people with mental distress and took its name from a disused suntan lotion factory. In 1993 CoolTan Arts moved to the Brixton dole office and stayed there until 1996. From 1996 to 2002 CoolTan Arts was homeless. In 2002 CoolTan moved to the Railway Arches in Loughborough Junction until 2006 when they moved to our current site on Walworth Road.
Partnership work and commissioning
CoolTan Arts is looking to work in partnership with other service providers, takes commissions, service level agreements and referrals.
CoolTan Arts hires and sells high quality pieces of artwork to other organisations, hires its workshops, professional tutors to run multi-disciplinary art workshops and advocacy / self-advocacy sessions.
CoolTan Arts has 19 years experience of running arts activities for people with mental distress. Every year 15% of people who use CoolTan Arts’ facilities move on into the wider community, employment, college, volunteering or other forms of empowerment.
"CoolTan changed my head space and I stopped being a person who is only mentally ill, l was able to revalue my whole life, I now have a part time job. I got the confidence and skills I needed by attending an IT workshop at CoolTan, I also helped out as a volunteer if it wasn’t for CoolTan I do not know where I would be now." Participant X
For more information on CoolTan Arts contact Kathrin Kirrmann, Communications Officer. |
