A woman sways gently in her wheelchair to soft music played nearby.  She likes the rustling touch of soft cloth on her face.  She doesn’t use conventional language, but her face says ‘serene’.  This is Entelechy Arts’ ‘Ambient Jam’, a weekly oasis for adults in Lewisham with profound and multiple learning disabilities.

The smartly dressed care home manager ushers the anxious daughter and her rather confused mother into the reception room.  Head down, he fires off questions briskly about Mum’s needs for support before moving swiftly on to tell these potential customers the prices and regulations.  This is Entelechy Arts ‘The Home’, a simulated experience of fictional care: care at its least caring and most disabling.

Fred has a lovely voice which he enjoys using in a choir of mates from the local community. They come together every Tuesday at the Albany Theatre in Deptford and sing popular songs before enjoying chat and coffee in the café: no fuss or formalities, but friendliness galore. This is Entelechy Arts’ ‘Meet Me at the Albany’.

These bursts of creative living have lifted people in Lewisham for 35 years. They have inspired me endlessly, I reflect, as I step down from 6 years as Chair of the charity. And it’s true to Entelechy’s passion to be led by people with personal experience of challenges that our new Chair is the pioneering Jess Thom, co-founder of the disabled-led company Touretteshero.  Jess is a true live wire: full of energy and ideas; she makes the sound bite ‘art for all’ count for real.  Great news for the charity and for creative expression.

That Entelechy has been able to offer these joyous life chances, to stretch out imaginatively and test boundaries is the achievement of its dedicated artists and wonderful community.  But, vitally, it has been enabled to do this with cornerstone support from Arts Council England (ACE), who some years ago designated Entelechy a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO), and have kept faith with us ever since.

All of us who have led charities have lived through the wearing daily reality (and distraction) of chasing funding: that ‘3.00 am experience’ of waking to worry about the next donation or fundraising event’.  There are nearly a thousand NPOs, who with this core funding are that much freer to think, perchance to dream, to take risks, to create. We still have to earn our crust and account for our art, but we have a little bit more help and a lot more self-belief.

As a former public servant, I know there are few bouquets to be had, more often the opposite. The Arts Council has had a fair amount of kicking for its recent funding decisions. In fact, a very unfair amount. We claim to live in a democracy, electing politicians to make decisions. ACE was instructed by those elected leaders to move £24 million out of London’s funding. It has all the same managed to extend NPO status to nearly 60 London arts organisations.

The policy shift here was part of ‘Levelling Up’: a vote-courting slogan parading above an important purpose, to rebalance cultural engagement and spending across the country.  Officials in public agencies are sometimes caricatured as axe-wielding philistines.  But what I have seen continually first-hand in ACE’s consultations and decisions is thoughtful, hardworking officials working to translate an easy slogan into meaningful realities.  To help communities in Stoke and Wigan but also Barking and Croydon, better engage with creative life.

This isn’t dumbing down.  It is more “inclusive” (that word): removing the many different blocks to normal opportunity for many people otherwise left out. We need both high art and supposedly “lowbrow” community arts. I had the good fortune to sing for a few years in one of the best UK choirs, Ex Cathedra, based in Birmingham, also an NPO. Artistically their Bach Passion on Good Friday or their creatively sparky Candlelight concerts is the very best. But Ex Cathedra also works with children in hospitals and stroke recovery patients in hospitals. We need “both and” in our cultural offer if we are a fair society.

ACE’s critics have been vocal. Entelechy and many other NPOs are here for people with no voice. Those censorious guns have been aimed at the wrong targets. Certainly, one could examine carefully the quality of recent Culture Secretaries and their approach to decision-making. But the pain experienced in any caution or cutbacks in cultural investment is part of an even bigger problem.

We just haven’t, in our public policy or funding, put the things that give us joy, and make life worth living, at the top of our agenda. This failure starts very early in life and damages the educational experience of many young people in state schools.  Despite the rising tide of strong evidence about its impact and cost-effectiveness ‘cultural investment’ is still just a “nice to have” not top of a government’s to-do list.

Life as you grow older or deal with disabilities has to deal increasingly with prescriptions, bandages and appointments. But what about the “why we get up in the morning” ? Who we look forward to seeing and spending time with?  To make something creative happen is truly to live. To adapt Shaw, we don’t stop playing because we grow old, “disabled” or infirm.  We grow old, disabled or infirm because we stop playing. Entelechy Arts is in a constant state of excitement about its next day of play.

Paul Cann is CEO of the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection