2025 has been a year full of creativity, collaboration and lived experience, and we’re proud to share what we’ve achieved!
Bringing Lived Experience to Life
Our mission is to help people use their creativity and lived experience to make life happier, healthier and fairer for all. This year, we brought stories to life through immersive audio, film, music, theatre and interactive workshops. Using participatory arts and co-production principles, we worked with professional artists, partners in health and social care, and diverse groups of people sharing their lived experience to make a real difference. At the heart of our work is a simple question: what is possible from an arts project with community participation at its core?
Growth, Partnerships and Investment
We delivered projects across our For Research, Training & Events and Armchair Adventures programmes, alongside our community creative groups. We co-produced work with funders and partners including GMCA Foundational Economy Innovation Fund, The Ideas Fund and the Energy Saving Trust. Growing investment has helped us deliver more projects with higher artistic quality, wider impact and greater reach. We also developed a new 5-year business plan strategy, that will be supported by a task and finish group and be launched publicly in the coming year.
Artistic Excellence
We’re proud of the artistic quality achieved in 2025. We worked with more freelance writers, film makers, composers and musicians than ever before. We invested in production equipment and, for the first time, collaborated with a freelance photographer on our project STUCK.
Community and Collaboration
MBM is built on a supportive community: participants from our creative and lived experience groups, teams from partner organisations, our in-house team, and freelance artists. Together, we align our work around three aims: Happier – high-quality creative experiences, Healthier – improving wellbeing, and Fairer – challenging stigma and inequality.
Thank you to everyone who’s been part of our 2025 journey!
Read the full annual report here or watch the short film below to see more of what we’ve achieved.
Looking for ways to bring lived experience into your work?
Sign up for our Members Area to access audio stories, training materials, and workshop guides—all themed around key health & social care topics. Start exploring today!
For more information about how Made By Mortals can support your project including a quote, please email admin@madebymortals.org or call 0161 804 2078