Kaleido Arts: A Social Enterprise Using Creativity to Heal Trauma

What are some of the highlights of your time studying at Sheffield university?

Having studied for my first degree at Hull University, I took an MA in English Literature at Sheffield University and graduated in 2000. It’s a long time ago now, but I have fond memories of Sue Vice’s Holocaust Literature seminars and how sweet she was in stark contrast to the horrors of the historical context. (Looks like she’s still at Sheffield Uni so she may even read this!). 

Saturday nights at retro disco Pop Tarts in the Student Union were also a lot of fun as was moshing at the iconic Leadmill. 

I also fell in love with the hills, leafy suburbs and people of Sheffield, one of the reasons I moved back here nine years later.

Could you tell me about Kaleido Arts and what inspired you to start the business?

At Kaleido Arts for Wellbeing, our mission is to use creative arts to bring wellbeing to people suffering because of war, discrimination, abuse and loss. We recognise that trauma and mental health issues affect people from all walks of life, and we believe everyone should have the opportunity to experience freedom and joy through creativity.

My story is a long one taking in several years of English teaching (both overseas and in the UK), a cross-cultural marriage, a novel about child sex-trafficking in Cambodia and an interest in refugees and asylum seekers, all of which prepared the ground for the mix of curriculum development and trauma-informed creativity in community that mark my role in Kaleido Arts.

How did your idea turn into a business?

Late 2019, I was part of the leadership team of a Christian creative network called Kaleidoscope. Jez, the guy who headed it up shared with the rest of the team a conversation he’d had with a doctor friend about the power of the arts to bring healing to people’s lives. 

He also threw out there – “Wouldn’t it be great if we could set up an arts for wellbeing charity at some point?” My heart sped when I heard this, and I started to explore what this could look like.

In 2021, having built up a small team of people interested in helping me shape the vision and direction of this idea, we set up Kaleido Arts for Wellbeing as a Community Interest Company (CIC) and piloted our first programme – Writing for Wellbeing - in Pitsmoor where I live.

What have been the biggest challenges?

• I never saw myself as a business person, so the whole experience of running and developing a business has been a huge learning curve. I was grateful for my early mentorship and training firstly on the School for Social Entrepreneur’s Start Up programme and secondly on the SEGA programme run by the Sheffield Social Enterprise Network.

• I was good at developing curriculum and building a team of people to do the things I could not, but I found it difficult to figure out how we were going to actually make an income and grow and it was only in 2024 that I latched onto the licensing business model (thanks to the excellent book by Des McCabe on the subject) and began developing our training programmes.

• A particular challenge has been income generation. When you’re starting up, grant providers want to see evidence of your impact before they will give you larger pots of money so in the early days we ran our workshops on small project-based grants. The first two and a half years I received no salary from Kaleido Arts so had to tutor alongside my Kaleido Arts work. It felt like an absolute dream when we received our first large pot of money from the Postcode Lottery Foundation and I was able to pay myself properly for six months.

• Despite mental health challenges being on the rise across the UK, traditional funding for services—especially preventative and community-based approaches—is declining. As an organisation using creative health interventions to support vulnerable groups, including refugees and asylum seekers, we have faced growing challenges in securing sustainable funding to expand our impact.

• Creative wellbeing activities are often misunderstood or undervalued by stakeholders who view them as “soft” or less rigorous than clinical therapies. There are stakeholders who do understand creative health, but the funding is limited and therefore competition for such pots of money is high.

 What have been the biggest rewards throughout the journey of setting up the business?

The rewards of running a social enterprise have outweighed the challenges – eg. seeing our turnover grow in the first 3 years exponentially and successfully launching our first Kaleido Konnector training day in May 2025.

My greatest joy is seeing the life-changing impact our creative programmes have on those taking part. One young woman who took part in three of our sessions last term told our Drumming for Wellbeing team that she had been sectioned every Christmas for three years. This year, she stayed out of hospital for the first time, crediting Kaleido Arts as the “main reason” for that shift. 

Another woman said our workshops enabled her to connect with her African culture and feel seen, and yet another said that our workshops were “better than therapy” as they enabled a sense of connection and belonging.

What does it mean to you to be listed as a Top 100 Social Enterprise in the UK?

It is extremely validating, knowing that all the hard work and love put in by our team has been recognised.

Top 100 Social Enterprise List by Natwest

What are the biggest lessons you've learned from being part of a start-up business?

Resilience is important. You need to be able to handle the knock backs and rejection that you will inevitably experience. I’ve also learned to take a healthy pride in what we have been able to achieve in four years. It’s easy to allow imposter syndrome to creep in and to compare yourself to other people doing amazing things and to say well I’ve not done X and I’ve only achieved Y, but with just a subtle change of language you can say I have done A and I have done B! 

Finally, it is important to stay humble and recognise your need to keep learning and developing in the areas you are not good at and to be able to pass on to others things that you haven’t got capacity for.