Jeremy Mayall SDG3 Good Health and Wellbeing

Arts, culture, and creativity can be woven into everything we do, says Creative Waikato CEO Jeremy Mayall. 

“It makes the world a better place.”

Creative Waikato as an organisation champions arts, culture, and creativity to be “interwoven into the entire human experience.” 

Mayall – himself an accomplished creative artist and academic - is excited by the opportunity to work with others on this initiative.  “I think the really interesting thing about the Waikato Wellbeing Project is the scope for collaboration, cross region and cross sector.”  

The challenge, he says, is “how do we feed that process into the community in a really powerful way?” 
Creative Waikato is aligned with SDG 3: Good Health and Wellbeing. 

The not-for-profit trust focuses on creative arts capability building; and strengthening understanding of the arts across the Waikato region.

“Our core vision is for a region that prospers with diverse and transformative creative activity. A place that understands that this creative activity is a fundamental part of what makes us all human.”

He says the 10 targets of the Waikato Wellbeing Project are all individual elements, “but wellbeing is actually a lived experience, and being a person today is a holistic thing and everything is interwoven and interconnected.” 

“A big part of how we try to approach wellbeing is that we look at it as a woven blanket and the horizontal threads are arts, culture and creativity and the vertical threads are everything else.”
“If arts, creativity and culture are interwoven throughout everything we do it will make the world stronger, warmer and more beautiful and more engaging place.”

Mayall says he has been an advocate for the role the arts plays in wellbeing, long before he was in this job. “It is about an investment in people and how having arts, culture and creativity in their lives will make the world a better place to be in whether that is through mental wellbeing, or physical wellbeing or connection with community or sparking innovation or just playful fun with whanau.”

He says collaboration in a project like this is complex.  “We have to explore different organisations, different personalities and different strategic goals and how they align, but it can also be so rewarding.”
“For myself as a creative artist, collaboration is at the heart of what I do, so I know how meaningful and how transformative that can be it if works.”

“I think the goal, and the wish, and the desire, for this wellbeing project is for it to be really powerful and meaningful and for that change to be widely supported and for it to happen. To make a positive impact on the Waikato”