Get Involved in the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival
Join the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF) planning network and help shape arts and mental health events across Scotland. Get involved and make an impact in your area!
SMHAF is a national platform for everyone to create and share art inspired by mental health. Working with partners across Scotland, we support events that engage communities, open conversations, and widen access to the arts for people with experience of mental health problems.
Why Get Involved?
By joining our planning network, you can help shape the direction of the festival and develop events that reflect the needs and interests of people in your area. Hundreds of organisations already contribute to the festival each year, including health services, local authorities, arts organisations, charities and community groups.
Your organisation can host a wide range of activity as part of SMHAF, such as:
- Exhibitions
- Creative workshops
- Theatre and performance
- Live music
- Film screenings
- Discussions
- Community events
We welcome events of any size and format that use the arts or creativity to engage people in mental health.
How to Get Involved in Your Area
Regional partners play a key role in shaping how the festival reaches new communities and supports arts activity across Scotland. Regional partners coproduce with regional planning groups and participants, help to coordinate local programmes, engage other organisations, and support SMHAF’s development in new areas of Scotland.
This model ensures events are shaped by people who understand their communities, and our programme reaches people with lived experience of mental health problems. We believe that everyone should be able to access the arts to prevent poor mental health and build and protect good mental health, and that no one should be deprived of this opportunity because of who they are, the community they come from, or where they live.
Learn more about our regional partners and how to get involved in your area. If you can’t see your region listed and would like to help establish a planning group in your area, please get in touch.
Join Our National Planning Network
We’d love to hear from organisations who want to host events, support regional programmes, and shape the direction of the festival. Complete the contact form or email our team at smhaf@mentalhealth.org.uk to request to join our national planning network.