Dr David Stokes has been the Chief Executive of The Halpern Charitable Foundation since March 2019. The charity focuses on tackling mental health and social isolation through the arts, and also runs the well-known Nucleus Arts centres across Medway, supporting locally-based artists and increasing opportunities for creative business. Before joining The Halpern Charitable Foundation, David was the CEO of the Cleft Lip and Palate Association–the national charity for people affected by cleft; and prior to that had an extensive background in academic research and management, most recently running major collaborative research programmes at Imperial College London, including the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, and the Digital City Exchange smart cities programme.
He is currently deputy-chair of the Love Chatham initiative, is the lead-member for the Love Chatham festival, and is a founder of the Waghorn Sez arts challenge. David is a representative on a multitude of projects, such as the Social Isolation Forum, the Innovation Board, Medway for Business, Medway Artist Forum, Medway Cultural Partnership, and the Rochester and ChathamTown Forums(vice-chairing the latter). Previously he was on the steering committees of a number of national research programmes and research centres including SLUMBERS, Cleft Care UK, and the Centre for Appearance Research. He was part of the Council for Disabled Children, the Shared learning group on Public-Patient Involvement in research, the NHS Cleft Development Group, and chaired steering group of the Appearance Collective in the UK. David was also until recently a lecturer at Imperial College London. Artistically, David is a keen writer of all genres, and has won prizes for short stories and poetry.
For the e-conference, David will be presenting:
Cushioning the blow of COVID – Art to the rescue in Medway
At the Halpern Charitable Foundation, we believe in a world where everyone can express their creativity, no matter their age, background, status or health. By making the arts open and accessible to all we aim to promote creative thinking, support the creative economy, and use the healing power of the arts to improve mental and physical health. In this presentation, we will share our experience of the Covid-19 crisis. We will set out the variety of ways that we have worked with a range of local partners to use the arts to help ease the burden of the crisis, and some of our plans for tackling any potential future waves of the virus. We will also talk about how the crisis has spurred some exciting new partnerships, and how we hope they will reshape Medway’s relationship with culture going forward.