Covid-19 CARE: one year on

It’s exactly one year since we embarked on our Covid-19 study so this is a good time to offer a quick retrospective of what we’ve achieved.

The keynote to this year has been flexibility and responsiveness. When we began our project in September 2020, we set out, firstly, to capture the effect on mental health of restricted access to the arts, and then to undertake follow-up by assessment of the impact on mental health of gradually renewed access, using interviews and questionnaires at 3-month intervals over 9 months. In fact, ‘Wave 1’ - which was intended to capture the mental health impacts of lockdown, and expected to occupy months 1-3 of our study only – lasted the entire 9 months, until May 2021.

This state of flux has kept us agile. As the period of lockdown was extended, we took the opportunity to expand our participant base to include arts administrators and practitioners as well as beneficiaries. As we now begin to interview study participants for a second and third time, therefore, we are able to build a very rich picture of the varied effects of restricted access to arts and culture during the pandemic, as well as a nuanced understanding of the diverse experiences of the transition to renewed access or hybrid provision. Over the coming weeks and months this blog series will report on findings from the most recent waves of our study (for earlier findings please see our previous blogs).


Our openness to change has also fantastically enriched our project in other ways. So strong has been the enthusiasm for the project that we have more than twice the number of external partners we started with, and we have extended membership of the advisory board to include key researchers and policy-influencers in the Liverpool City Region. We have also significantly added to our own research team, doubling the number of researchers during the course of the project through successful application for internal research development and innovation funding. A further expansion was possible thanks to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Graduate Research Internship scheme adding two graduate interns to our team who have specifically focused on the communication about mental health issues during the pandemic on various social media platforms.

This growth has significantly increased the outputs emerging from our study. When we started out, we expected to produce two or three publications at the very end of the project. In fact, we published our first policy brief, as part of the Heseltine Institute Covid-19 series in April 2021, the half-way point of the study, and we have already submitted our first paper to a peer-reviewed journal with two further papers now in preparation.


Above all, perhaps, this has been an exhilarating year of public engagement. Locally, we have had regular meetings with our project partners to update them on our findings and to seek their sterling advice on the direction and development of the study. We have also begun to step up the regional and national reach of our work, by making strategic connections with local arts consortia (Liverpool Arts Regeneration Consortium, LARC; Creative Organisations of Liverpool, COoL) and - thanks to our advisory board, as well as UoL’s Division of Communications and Public Affairs - with local MPs and UK policy-makers.

Our funders, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), are also supporting the impact potential of our study through the efforts of the ‘Pandemic and Beyond’ project, a team based at the University of Exeter, which is co-ordinating all AHRC-funded Covid-19 studies, and launching a national communication strategy and media campaign in the coming Winter/Spring. We have already contributed to the AHRC/Pandemic and Beyond podcast series, with ‘Arts, Culture and Mental Health’, produced in collaboration with two of our valued partners, first broadcast in May 2021.


The CARE project officially ends in the first month of 2022. But the priorities of this study – not only the impact of Covid-19 on arts organisations and their beneficiaries, but the critical importance of Liverpool’s vibrant arts and cultural life to the wellbeing of its citizens - remains as live an issue now as when we started out. We look forward to long-term collaboration with our amazing partners in the months and years ahead.

Professor Josie Billington, Department of English, PI, Covid-19 CARE