Policy and Action Roundtable: Social Prescribing in Southwestern Pennsylvania

The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council is hosting a Policy and Action Roundtable on social prescribing at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild - MCG Jazz Concert Hall on Wednesday, November 4. It runs from 9:00 to 11:30 AM, and tickets are $15. This is the second session in the Council's Policy and Action series, which is working to move social prescribing from a concept to something with a concrete impact here in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

If you haven't come across the term before, social prescribing is when a healthcare provider connects a patient to non-clinical, community-based resources—including the arts—as part of how their health and well-being are supported. It's not a new idea; it started in the UK back in the 1970s and gained wider adoption through the NHS Long Term Plan. In England, referrals topped 1.4 million in 2023, and a 2026 UK analysis found improvements in well-being after a referral. Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to scale it statewide, in partnership with SocialRx.

The roundtable brings together leaders from the arts, policy, philanthropy, and healthcare to figure out where and how social prescribing can deliver impact in this region, what it would mean for the local arts ecosystem, and what kind of policy and funding infrastructure is needed to make it work. It's a working session, so the goal is to move past the theory and toward something practical.

The panel includes Courtney Abegunde, Managing Director of Steel Smiling; Chris Appleton, Founder and CEO of SocialRx; State Representative Jessica Benham; Dr. Matt Hurford, CEO of Community Care Behavioral Health; and Dr. Sushma Kola, a neurologist at Allegheny Health Network. It's a wide range of perspectives—arts, policy, and healthcare all at the same table—which is exactly what the session is built around. The roundtable is at the MCG Jazz Concert Hall, 1815 Metropolitan St. on the North Side, on Wednesday, November 4, from 9:00 to 11:30 AM, with tickets at $15.