30 years of Impact Art's charity success celebrated with display

Impact Arts, which was established in 1994, has helped hundreds of thousands of people of all ages through three decades of creative engagement.

And this weekend, the charity will celebrate with a public gallery of work outside their Merchant City headquarters.

Established by Susan Aktemel in 1994, the organisation’s mission was to tackle social inequality using art, aiming to improve the lives and prospects of some of the country’s most vulnerable people.

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Among the early, and most enduring, projects are 1997’s Woodlands Mosaic Bollards on West Princess Street in Woodlands, the Linkes Mosaic Mural in Knightswood, created in 2005, and stained glass windows of Pineview Housing Association in Drumchapel, also designed in 2005.

Theatre shows and gigs from the likes of Amy Macdonald have also been held since 1994, in a wide ranging national programme which has seen 300,000 people engaging with the project.

Yet the charity’s chief executive Fiona Doring pointed to the increasing number of young people suffering from mental ill-health as evidence of the ongoing importance of the organisation’s work.

She said: “There’s a mental health crisis out there and that need has gone through the roof. We have a contract to deliver art therapy for every primary school in Glasgow, what we are seeing is really heartbreaking in terms of anxiety among young people. It’s going to take a sustained effort to support those young people. 

“Previously a lot of what we were doing was about helping people into the job market, whereas now there’s a whole other journey too. There’s a real need for early stage intervention now.

A mosaic in Knightswood from 2005 (Image: Handout)

“Our projects use the arts and creativity as the tools to transform people’s lives. We have projects that support people’s wellbeing, support their life chances, employability, education and connections to local community.

“We support people who need support the most, people who have greater barriers to positive progress in their lives, at various junctions and at any age.

“We run parenting programmes for young parents, we have art therapists working with primary age children who have experienced trauma or abuse, and employability projects for young people for whom school maybe isn’t the best learning environment. 

“We have programmes for people who have been homeless, older people who might be isolated in the community. We’re about a whole life journey with art at the heart of it all.”

One of Impact Arts’ most successful projects is Make It Your Own, formerly Fab Pad, which pairs vulnerable tenants with artists in their homes.

Doring said: “It’s a programme for people who have been homeless, working with interior designers so that they can sustain their tenancy.”

The organisation have bases in Edinburgh and Ayrshire, where a new project with Sustrans in Irvine will see the transformation of a riverside underpass on National Cycle Network 7 in coming weeks.

Work has also been done at the Glasgow Children's Hospital (Image: Handout)

Doring said: “We’ll employ three young artists from our projects who will get paid to work alongside a commissioned mural artist to design the mural on the underpass.

“Each year we employ 80 artists to deliver our work. I think there’s something important in that, that art can be seen as a viable career.”

Doring hopes this week’s exhibition will see the charity reconnect with people who have accessed their support over the last 30 years. 

She said: “Putting on an exhibition at our headquarters at the Boardwalk for the next few days is a chance for us to take stock and hear some of the stories about Impact Arts, and recognising and sharing some of the work and achievements. It’s a bit of a celebration.”