2024/2025 Annual Report

For the past decade, sp(i)eel has been dedicated to creating access to the healing arts, facilitating spaces where people can reconnect with themselves, each other, and the land. We have had the privilege to see how connection through music, movement, colour and story builds capacity for repair and, in turn, transformation.

We understand repair through the arts as a practice of remembering our interconnection. The arts reconnect us with our embodied knowledge, innate wisdom of ways to health and wellbeing that is passed down to us through generations in our cells and through daily acts of repair.

From there grows our commitment to collective health: the understanding that health and wellbeing is not an individual pursuit, but shared, ongoing acts of care that ripple through relationships, communities, and generations. As we step into the next decade, we look forward to continuing to grow Arts and Health in the African South together.

2022/2023 Annual Report

Ke a itlhokomela, re a itlhokomela, re gola mmogo.

I care for myself, we care for each other, and we grow together.

Sp(i)eel Collective advocates for the development of community-centred models of health care and wellness. We address intergenerational and structural trauma from a biopsychosocial perspective that focuses on resourcing and repairing circles of support in rural communities.

The health and wellness crisis that our country is facing is a systemic issue, not an individual one, and it needs a collective response. We understand that health and wellness impact a person’s ability to work, form healthy and positive relationships, parent from a regulated and not a reactive place, be open to learning new things, mitigate stressful and harmful environments, think creatively to solve problems and lead a fulfilling life.

This report reflects on the implementation of eight projects, reaching schools, care workers, farm labourers, management teams, and government agencies working in the child protection system. The programs follow our Families and Collective Futures logic model, where we map health and wellbeing alongside a community before co-creating an intervention plan.

Download our 2022/2023 Annual Report by clicking on the image below:

2021/2022 Annual Report

Our work in community health and wellbeing culminated in a published logic model: Families and Collective Futures. This model reflects our commitment to engage innate, experiential and local knowledges through the arts to create community based models of health care that is culturally responsive to the groups that it serves. It is a movement away from the individualistic practices of the dominant Western model of mental health care and an effort to emphasize inherent strengths and protective factors that can serve communities in repairing circles of support in the face of ongoing structural and historical trauma.

Download our 2021/2022 Annual Report by clicking on the image below: