ReCITE brings together communities, health professionals, creatives, and researchers to co-produce creative solutions to unfair and avoidable health disadvantages that reflect real lived experience and genuine local need.
The project has been making strong strides across Liverpool, Knowsley, and Sefton, some of the most deprived areas in the Merseyside region. At its heart, ReCITE is about tackling deep-rooted health inequities using the power of creativity, storytelling, and collaboration.
Engaging Communities Through Storytelling
A major focus of our work has been building trust and visibility through creative engagement. One of our flagship efforts, the What’s Your Story programme, ran in three areas (Kirkby, Bootle, and Toxteth) and supported 26 local participants in shaping and sharing their personal health stories. Through workshops led by professional artists and a final community showcase, participants gained confidence, found their voice, and shared their experiences with families, friends, and health sector professionals. These stories are being developed into short films to amplify their impact.
A recap of the community showcase event is HERE.
Building Innovation from the Ground Up
To design solutions that are led and owned by communities, ReCITE established 10 Community Innovation Teams (or “CITs”). Each team is a diverse coalition of community members, GPs, health workers, and volunteers working together to explore local data, uncover root causes of health inequity, and co-create creative interventions.
The impact is already visible. In Everton and Anfield, one CIT launched a creative campaign encouraging breast cancer screening, using poetry, humour, music, and storytelling to engage in over 2,000 conversations. The result? A measurable 25% drop in missed mammogram appointments. In Knowsley, school children were invited to share their knowledge and experiences about health through interactive workshops. Their insights are now shaping vaccination strategies in their schools.
Fostering Regional Collaboration
In March 2025, ReCITE hosted the first-ever Creative Health Exchange at Liverpool Lighthouse, an event that brought together 138 stakeholders from across the city region. Artists, healthcare providers, commissioners, and community leaders gathered to celebrate creativity and health, make connections, and begin imagining a more collaborative, integrated system.
The Exchange marked a turning point not just for ReCITE, but for the wider ecosystem. Encouragingly, the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority has agreed to support and co-host future exchanges, which will sustain this movement beyond the life of the project.
Our blog “Creative Health Exchange Rocks: When Stories Change the Ecosystem” highlights how integrating storytelling into community health initiatives can transform healthcare systems by fostering trust, addressing health inequalities, and promoting collaborative action.
Strengthening Our Impact
Nine community co-researchers are currently working with the team to evaluate the interventions we’ve launched so far. Their role is vital in helping us to understand what works, for whom, why it works, and how we can scale it up. In the coming months, we’ll be expanding this co-researcher network and deepening our learning.
At the same time, we're turning our attention to advocacy. While much of ReCITE’s work has focused on individuals and communities, lasting change requires action at the structural level. We’re now building advocacy networks that will engage with decision-makers, push for sustained funding, and champion the inclusion of community voices and creative approaches in healthcare planning and commissioning.
Looking Ahead
Our ambition is to bring all of these strands together into a Creative Health Strategy for the Liverpool City Region - one that is co-designed with communities, responsive to local needs, and rooted in the idea that creativity is not an extra, but an essential ingredient in public health.
ReCITE is demonstrating what’s possible when lived experience, creativity, and evidence come together. We’re proud of how far we’ve come - and even more excited about what’s next.
You can listen to the recorded presentation of this ReCITE’s progress update HERE, presented during an online exchange of the MCA (Mobilising Community Assets) funding programmes administered through University College London (UCL).