Wellbeing through a lens: POMOC in Scarborough

I was commissioned by North Yorkshire Council to support some community engagement work that they were undertaking specifically around people’s thoughts and perspectives on health & wellbeing. This blog is the first of a series sharing the journey we took together using Participatory Photography.

The Council were particularly interested in the voices of people who they might not otherwise hear and connected me with a group called POMOC which has been set up in Scarborough & Ryedale to provide information, advice and guidance to members of the Eastern European community so they are able to fully engage with life in the area.

Working alongside members of the POMOC group we created a set of photographs and words inspired by our conversations and questions around the idea of what a good life looks like. It was such a wonderful couple of days spent with members of the community, building connections between those involved and exploring our surroundings through photographs.

I asked the group to take some photographs that represented their experience of taking part in the photovoice activities:

I loved how everyone embraced the approach and we had some amazing conversations as a result. I am hugely grateful to Bianca from POMOC for hosting the project so brilliantly and bringing together such a wonderful group of people to take part.

I am always encouraging host partners to make full use of the Photo voice images as a resource to support their wider work and so we we will be using these photographs in a series of events at Libraries across North Yorkshire, you can read more about that experience in the next blog in this series which is coming soon!