Projects

Enabling Connections is a collaboration between The Cordialis Foundation and Warrigal Queanbeyan (a residential care facility in NSW) to pilot resources for embedding creative care in a residential aged-care facility.

 

Funded by a Community Grant from the Queanbeyan-Palarang Regional Council, the Cordialis team will collaborate with care staff to develop resources that will help both staff and residents embed creative care into their daily lives. This reduces the reliance on incursions from external individuals, empowering staff, residents and visiting family members to embed creative care into their lives and interactions.

Heritage Community Singing events are facilitated by Cordialis Co-Founder Dr Georgia Pike-Rowney, accompanied by Cordialis Co-Founder Dr Susan West on piano. Georgia facilitates these participatory heritage events for all ages, reintroducing a heritage of community singing that formed a core part of the Australian community life in the interwar period, supporting wellbeing and recovery after WWI and during the depression years. 

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This project builds upon research undertaken by Dr Pike-Rowney at the National Library of Australia in 2020/2021, on a research fellowship supported in the memory of Averill Edwards. This led to a small project funded by the Queanbeyan-Palarang Regional Council in 2022: 'Singing in the Park', a collaboration with the Queanbeyan Historical Museum. This then developed into a larger scale Heritage Community Singing Regional Tour through the Reconnecting Regional NSW Community Program. Visit our Humanitix events page for future Heritage Community Singing opportunities.

Researching and conceptualising Everyday Singing as a form of creative care forms the basis of Cordialis Chair and Co-Founder Dr Susan West's second PhD, based in Occupational Therapy department at the University of Canberra. In this project, Everyday Singing is conceived of as a form of regular, free, embedded, and self-instigated caring activity for all. Framed as a form of Musical Care, this conception of Everyday Singing emerges from the longitudinal practice and research of the Music Engagement Program (MEP), the organisation at the heart of the now expanded Cordialis Foundation.

 

The MEP singing approach is a social-altruistic form of music making that encourages everyone to participate in musical activity, particularly singing, while supporting the musical activity of others. The approach has shown significant impacts in overcoming the documented singing anxiety of adults in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand as a means of enabling access to regular singing for those with less autonomy, such as children and the elderly. Learn more by reading Susan's published research article on Everyday Singing.