Thomas Reynhout

Thomas Reynhout is the project officer for a new project in Flanders called “Heritage Wellbeing” (“ErfGoedVoelen” in Dutch).

For this project, three museums in the city of Ghent, namely The House of Alijn, Dr. Guislain Museum and Heritage Centre | Sisters of Charity SCJM, combine their years of experience in using cultural heritage for well-being.

The project aims at creating sustainable relationships between the museums and different healthcare partners. In addition to this, it wants to contribute to scientific research on the impact of cultural heritage on well-being.

Thomas will be speaking at:

Museums, Health & Wellbeing Summit

Tuesday, 7th February 2023

Using the Cultural Heritage of Daily Life to Enhance Well-Being

The House of Alijn is a unique museum because of the preservation of daily life objects. These objects enhance conversations and offer sentiments of joy to participants. We will take a look at the starting point for our project: What is it about daily life objects from the past that make us feel good?, can everyday objects from the past enhance the well-being of seniors in isolation?

In this presentation, we will tackle these questions. We share the pearls and pitfalls of our Art of Living project, where we used the cultural heritage of daily life to enhance the well-being of seniors experiencing loneliness and social isolation.

We will explain which steps we took into making this project a sustainable long-term collaboration between the museum and the different health care providers in the areas surrounding the museum.