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. David has a particular interest in the development of arts as a health tool, and developing standards in planning, evaluation and the communication of outcomes for arts practitioners.
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 Chatham Town Forum, the Love Chatham initiative, and Creative Medway. He is the lead-member for the Love Chatham festival, and Chinese New Year Festival. David is a representative on a multitude of projects, such as the Social Isolation Forum, the Innovation Board, Medway for Business, Medway Artist Forum, the VCS Leaders group. He has recently been appointed to the board of the Institute for Inclusive Communities and Environments at the University of Greenwich, and as an Ambassador for Chatham Historic Dockyard.
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 the steering group of theAppearance Collective in the UK. David was also until recently a course leader at Imperial College London.
MAIHAI: A Single Approach to Evaluating Creative Social Proscribing
Global healthcare services face considerable pressure to tackle an unprecedented wave of poor mental health concerns, with significant social and economic impacts. Arts for Health offers effective and efficient ways to tackle these issues. We propose that a first steps towards maximising the benefits of this would be the creation of an agreed approach to planning and evaluation – the ‘Nucleus Matrix’ – and a uniform reporting language, ‘MIAHAI’ (Minimum Information About Health Arts Interventions).
By adopting and developing this approach across the field of AfH, practitioners will rapidly build up a
thorough understanding of techniques and methods. In early 2024, the Medway Transformation Academy agreed to develop the Nucleus Matrix as a standard evaluation approach for Medway’s charitable sector, and instigated a series of trials across a number of organisations. This presentation offers the first learning from these trails.
Roundtable: Creativity, Health and Community
This roundtable will look at some of the issues and challenges facing our communities for which creativity and the arts might provide interventions.