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Start in Manchester uses art as a vehicle to help people recovering from serious mental distress re‐establish their lives in their communities. Wendy Teall, Annie Tortora‐Cailey and Jill Cunningham describe one recent project with Manchester University's Whitworth Art Gallery that aimed to explore how and why arts work is so good for mental health and well‐being.

Start Manchester is an arts‐based, face‐to‐face mental health service within the emergent field of arts in mental health. This article describes its work and demonstrates how it uses art in a health‐focused way. While the article refers to some of the literature that explores how and why the experience of art can be beneficial to mental health, it is explicitly written from a practitioner perspective. As such, it foregrounds the thoughts/feelings of the service users (referred to throughout as students) about their engagement with the project, in order to refine our understandings of the links between creative practices and mental health.

This article is about some of the benefits that arts activities can bring to people with mental health problems. In it, Wendy and Annie describe a research project set up in partnership with an art gallery, in which they looked at how perceptions, attitudes and behaviours might be positively affected by specially developed, guided arts activities. The project stimulated much thoughtful and perceptive feedback from participants, all of whom are mental health service users.

This index covers all issues between February 2005 (Volume 9, Issue 1) and November 2008 (Volume 12, Issue 4). Numbers in bold refer to yolume, numbers in brackets refer to issue, with subsequent numbers to pages.

The aim of this study was to describe the experiences of graduate students who participated in the community of practice (CoP) and identify areas for improvement to support academic success.

In total, 19 graduate students engaged in a CoP to facilitate social interactions, knowledge sharing and learning within a culture of scholarship. A descriptive qualitative research study was conducted using semistructured interviews with eight participants who had attended the CoP meeting.

All participants were from the School of Nursing and perceived the CoP to be beneficial, particularly international students who had challenges in adapting to new academic and social environments. Areas for improvement include creating a group structure that enhances belonging and learning.

This is the first CoP that was implemented at the Faculty of Health Sciences at the authors’ university. It has been the authors’ experience that a CoP can benefit graduate students through networking, knowledge sharing, social support and learning. The finding of this research will be used to inform a new CoP to address the needs of graduate students. The authors will be adapting the CoP to the current context that includes a virtual platform during the COVID-19 pandemic and will include content specific for international students.