Alongside the Flourishing Lives Advisory Group (FLAG), we invite you to our free online workshop exploring working-class creativity, ageing and belonging in the arts. In this interactive webinar, Emily Bird draws on over a decade of work with older people as a facilitator and project manager in community settings to explore how class continues to shape who feels able to access, participate in, and belong within creative spaces. Focusing on the relationship between class, ageing and creativity, Emily reflects on the structural barriers that have shaped many older people's relationship with culture across their lifetimes - "the barriers I navigate now as a working-class practitioner are rooted in the same structures that shaped many older people's access to culture decades ago." At a time when the arts sector is under pressure to reach "hard to reach" communities, widening inequality, the cost-of-living crisis and the closure of community spaces raise urgent questions about how participation is framed and who our cultural systems truly serve. Together we will explore how class is signalled and experienced within arts spaces, how lifelong structural exclusion shapes participation in later life, and why working-class creativity has often existed outside institutional definitions of "art". Emily approaches this conversation from her own perspective, born and raised on an inner-city council estate in Birmingham. The aim is to open thoughtful discussion across the arts, health and social care sectors about how we can create cultural spaces where all older people's histories, creativity and ways of seeing the world are authentically recognised and valued. Date: Wednesday 6th May, 11.00am-1pm BST Register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/working-class-creativity-ageing-belonging-in-the-arts-tickets-1985273366080?aff=oddtdtcreator We hope you can join us!