The association NO! We We Create! was born from the initiative of its Director, Elodie Thebault, visual artist graduated from the National School of Applied Arts and Crafts, with the support of Doctor Jean Michon, former head of pediatric oncology at the Institut Curie. From 2005, the first visual arts workshops at the Institut Curie were led by the founder of NOC and in 2015, the association was officially founded.
The NOC Association! organizes, leads and creates visual arts workshops in the Necker, Institut Curie and Louis Mourier hospitals, for children and adolescents hospitalized for a very long period. These plastic arts workshops aim to offer a window of imagination, creativity and expression, giving them a moment of escape throughout their treatment. Since 2005, more than 3500 young people have benefited from these visual arts workshops.
The NOC Association! offers these workshops to children and adolescents with serious pathologies ( cancers, kidney failure, psychiatric disorders… ). These workshops are free, regular and permanent within the hospitals. They enable children to improve their quality of life in hospital as part of an overall care process. Each workshop is given by visual arts teachers recruited and trained by NOC! and work in collaboration with the medical teams.
En 2021, NO! has proposed 230 workshops with 650 holdings and 1120 hours of lessons despite the difficult context linked to the health crisis. 162 new beneficiary patients joined the workshops as well as 150 indirect beneficiaries.
"At the age of nine, I was hospitalized for three years in a children's hospital in Tours. At this age, this drastic change in my daily life generated a lot of fear and stress. This period represents for me a nightmare from which it took me a long time to heal. If at that time, I had had access to NOC's plastic arts workshops! I'm sure I could have had at least one or two great memories from the hospital. "
Hanh-Phuc Bonvalet, Member of A Glass of Water
The NOC Association! particularly affects Un Verre d'Eau because its projects are part of one of Un Verre d'Eau's key areas of action, Culture. For us, art represents a tool for escaping from difficult living conditions, if only for a moment. Imagination is a window to get out of the white, sanitized, painful and sometimes distressing framework that the treatment of a pathology can inflict. Art brings children back to a world of color and innocence. A world that knows no limits except for the curious and creative minds of patients.
Thanks to the visual arts workshops of the NOC association! the young patients were able to have extremely beneficial effects such as the reappropriation of their bodies and their power to act. Improving their quality of life in hospital and recognition and social inclusion. The benefits of these workshops also have a huge impact on the families of the patients, bringing them relief in a distressing daily situation, but also by honoring the memory of young children and adolescents for grieving families through the exposure of their works outside hospitals. Finally, the collaboration between NOC! and medical teams also enriches the relationship between patients and caregivers while contributing to the enhancement of the overall mission of each hospital.
This is why Un Verre d'Eau has decided to support the NOC association! not only by organizing an upcoming fundraising campaign, but also by providing human help in the form of services. Un Verre d'Eau offers consulting expertise on supporting NOC's HR processes! as well as the creation of reporting tools. Our commitment to NOC! is therefore as much economic as human.
A Glass of Water continues to support the NOC association! for its projects in 2022, namely: association development, NO training engineeringC for the creation of new workshops and educational projects in new hospitals and the joint exhibition of four workshops.
If you wish to join the projects of the association NOC! and a Glass of Water, you can get more information about the NOC official website! or his Instagram.