You might have seen a photo of me in last week’s Chronicle looking excited at the event that marked me becoming a patron of the wonderful organisation Creative Recovery.

We had a smashing morning with a lovely pie-full buffet (always essential at any kind of patron-celebrating event) and towards the end of the session we all made up a poem together using a handy flipchart, and indeed when I got home my hands were covered in felt-tip pen ink, which I always see as the marker of any successful community art session.

Since last week a number of people have asked me about Creative Recovery and so I thought I’d share some things about and also about the idea of what Community Art is, because an area of work that I’ve been very involved in over the years.

Creative Recovery’s founding idea, it seems to me, is that everybody can be an artist and, more than that, everybody can become a better artist.

Let me emphasise that when I’m talking about art I don’t just mean drawing and painting. They work with music and writing and sculpture and movement and anything else you can think of that makes people feel good about who they are and who they can become.

Community art, sometimes called participatory art, is all about the idea that when we say the arts is for everybody we don’t just mean that everybody can look at a painting or listen to a piece of music or read a poem, it means that everybody can have a go at making something.

Of course people have always made things and painted and danced and sung and written poems, but at certain times in history it was assumed that a song written by someone in Barnsley couldn’t possibly be as good as an opera written by a famous composer.

If you asked people why that was the case they couldn’t really answer you. They’d just say ‘well, that’s how it is’ and organisations like Creative Recovery are here to tell us that ‘that’s how it is’ is an answer that makes no sense.

An example of this short-sighted thinking can happen when you go to a festival and somebody says ‘we’ve got local beer!’ and people cheer, and they say ‘we’ve got local cheese!’ and people cheer, and then they say ‘and we’ve got local poets!’ and people groan because somehow the local poets aren’t seen as good in the way that the cheese and the beer are but they are, they really are.

Creative Recovery began sixteen years ago in those halcyon pre-austerity days when it sometimes felt that absolutely anything was possible, particularly in the area of arts and health because it’s been proved time and time again that participation in the arts is good for wellbeing and also very good for that elusive quality known as community cohesion, which is particularly important at times like these when a lack of community cohesion can seem to be on the rise.

Sadly a dream for a borough-wide arts and health service wasn’t to be realised, but you can’t keep a good idea down.

As Helen Boutle from Creative Recovery said: “After years of further developing and fundraising for individual projects a group of participants and artists met, on a stormy night in a leaky room.

“We ate pie together dreamed of steering our own ship. Creative Recovery was constituted as a formal group on that night...”

See? I told you about the importance of pie!

I’m proud that when I was on Pointless Celebrities a few years ago and me and my teammate, the comedian Mark Watson, wiped the floor with the opposition I chose Creative Recovery as the charity I would donate to.

It was great to discuss Creative Recovery and Barnsley on national TV because, after all, the more people that know about Creative Recovery the better!

And now it seems to me that Creative Recovery is on the brink of exciting times, or should I say even more exciting times.

The range of events and workshops they’re putting on has a width and depth that’s truly inspiring and leads me to the conclusion that, in the not too distant future, Barnsley will be seen as even more of a leader in the field of arts and health. Have a look at their website to see what’s going on.

So watch this space! In fact, don’t just watch it: draw on it, paint on it, sing and dance on it and shape it something beautiful!