Take the January Challenge
The January Challenge invites everyone in the UK to explore their creative side. 50,000 peo-ple take the challenge each year and it has been running for 10 years. The premise is to reconnect people with their creative side and explore how creativity impacts positive change. January is a notoriously gloomy month, post Christmas celebrations. So what better way to lift the spirits? Art and creativity is known to boost wellbeing and happiness. This challenge is a mass participatory exer-cise, so you will be in the company (virtually) of many others. It is a celebration of everyday creativity across the UK featuring well-known and local community Creativity Champions from across the UK, including writers, mak-ers, and community groups. They have con-tributed ideas for the daily creative challenges and will host virtual events, contribute to pod-casts and run in-person workshops for the 31 days of January.
During this year’s challenge there are 31 Crea-tivity Champions including poet Michael Rosen, CBeebies presenter Nigel Clarke and artist Krystal Lowe.
All you need to do is sign up. Every morning throughout January, an inspiring invitation to be creative is emailed directly to everyone who is signed up.
Michael Rosen, Poet says: “The January Challenge is a lovely idea for people to think about the fact that you’ve got creativity inside you. Everybody has – they’re doing gardening and thinking, ‘Well, I’ll put this over there, and do this over there, I’ll just try that out’ – that’s actually creativity!”
Nigel Clarke, founder of Dadvengers and CBeebies’ presenter said: “I think The Janu-ary Challenge is amazing. It’s really accessible for people because it just allows people to get into whatever might interest them. One crea-tive prompt could be paints and another one could be music. I do a lot of work with parents and families and I started something called Dadvengers, we’re using that platform to share The January Challenge creative prompts for families and specifically for dads and men to get involved as it’s usually a little bit more difficult to get men involved in creative activi-ties.”
To find out more about The January Challenge, sign up and get involved in 2024 visit www.64millionartists.com. It’s FREE!