To help fund the ongoing costs of Support Together Southend peer support group for the next 12 months. (360G-EssexCF-A495001)
Funding Organization
£320
Recipient Organization
To help with the running costs of a peer support group for people with mental health problems in the Southend area
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Grant Details
| Amount Applied For | 320 |
| Amount Awarded | 320 |
| Award Date | 2018-11-14T00:00:00+00:00 |
| Beneficiary Location: Country Code | GB |
| Beneficiary Location: Geographic Code | E01015896 |
| Beneficiary Location: Geographic Code Type | LSOA |
| Beneficiary Location: Name | Southend-on-Sea 010B |
| Grant Programme: Code | 2018/19 |
| Grant Programme: Title | Firebird Fund |
| Impact Category | Advance people's physical and mental health, wellbeing and safety |
| Last Modified | 2021-04-29T00:00:00+00:00 |
| Planned Dates: Duration (months) | 11 |
| Planned Dates: End Date | 2019-12-31T00:00:00+00:00 |
| Planned Dates: Start Date | 2019-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 |
| Primary age group | Adults (26 – 65) |
| Primary beneficiary | People with mental health difficulties |
| Primary ethnicity | All Ethnicities |
| Primary issue | Mental health |
| Recipient Org: Charity Number | 271028 |
| Recipient Org: Description | Support Together Southend is a mental health peer support group that is led by volunteers with lived experience of mental illness. The group is part of the Rethink Mental Illness (RMI) groups network that supports over 130 groups like ours across England. This support includes DBS checks of our coordinators, safeguarding, GDPR guidance, risk assessments and auditing of our finances. Our group’s overall purpose is to empower, promote and advance the mental wellbeing of those in the local community of Southend-on-Sea and its surrounding areas. It does this by working towards the following aims: • Empowering members in their recovery by developing new skills to improve wellbeing. Through regular meetings the group provides a safe forum to exchange ideas and experiences of building and maintaining good mental health and wellbeing. The coordinators encourage members to share skills they have used to overcome obstacles in their lives with the rest of the group. The group also invite speakers on lifestyle, wellbeing and mental health topics. The group often does art and creative writing activities together. The group play games together some of which are physical activities. We are also open to trying new activities that the group believe would be helpful for their wellbeing. • Provide Peer Support. The group is led and facilitated by peers. Group members listen and share experiences but the group does not give advice. Coordinators provide details of agencies whose role it is to provide advice. The peer group offers support and provides a respectful non-judgmental environment. • Reducing social isolation and promote new social networks. By attending our meetings members can meet new people, develop new friendships and improve their lifestyle. • Improve awareness of support available in the local community and how mental health services, activities and opportunities can be accessed. Group coordinators will signpost members to services for additional support as appropriate and share their experiences of accessing services and voluntary opportunities. The group meets on the second Wednesday of the month between 7pm to 9pm and the last Saturday of the month between 12pm to 2pm at Balmoral Community Centre in Southend-on-Sea. Our venue allows us the use of a kitchen so we are able to provide free refreshments to our members such as tea, coffee and biscuits. The Wednesday meeting is our most attended meeting and has been running since November 2017. It is more structured with activities such as art, origami, creative writing, listening to guest speakers, social games and quizzes. It is also our main forum for feedback from group members in helping the coordinators offer the group future activities they would like to have. This is facilitated by giving members the opportunity to air their views on the activities of the group and to vote informally. We give group members the opportunity at the end of most meetings to leave positive and negative feedback on “post it” notes that are then placed under a ‘Good’ and ‘Needs improvement’ column on our whiteboard. We like to have guest speakers whenever possible. Speakers have included an individual from Southend Council to discuss cycling, an individual from Peabody to discuss the housing and support services they provide and someone from Southend Association of Volunteer’s to discuss the supported volunteering services they provide locally. We also have had a member from the community policing team speak and last August we had our member of parliament for Southend West Sir David Amess attend to learn more about our group. The Saturday meeting is our newest regular meeting that we started this year. After trialling various physical activities in partnership with RMI over a rolling fortnightly schedule we have found a meeting on the last Saturday of each month since May the most beneficial. This is more informal to get the group more active and socialising. We have various activities on offer including table ping pong, crazy golf, tumble tower block game, board games, dominoes, cards and we can sometimes use the garden for outdoor activities too. We had our first Post Christmas Social and Raffle with party food on the 28th December 2018. This was a three hour event. The raffle ticket sales funded the costs of the food and drink. Some of our prizes were donated by well known mental health authors such as Matt Haig and Ruby Wax. Our next one is scheduled on the 30th December 2019 and we plan to continue to do this every year if it continues to be popular. We also had a three hour event of games and quizzes to celebrate ‘Time to Talk’ day on Thursday 7th February 2019. This day is part of the social movement led by Time to Change (TTC) to challenge the way we think and act about mental health problems. Our coordinator Shaun is a TTC Champion and was recently awarded a £380 grant from the TTC East Essex hub to run a social contact and community event on the next ‘Time to Talk’ day on Thursday 6th February 2020. The expectation is that our group will be involved in this again. We always welcome group members to discuss concerns with coordinators separately or even to facilitate them to escalate it to the National Groups Manager of RMI. We also encourage our members to get involved in volunteering and fundraising for us as well. In 2020 we would like to continue offering our current support and further improve on this. We want to promote our group more effectively so we can reach more people and spread awareness of what we do. We would like to buy more materials and equipment to improve the quality of our creative activities such as arts, craft and writing. We would like to purchase several books to create a small ‘wellbeing library’ that our group members can borrow to improve their own mental wellbeing and psychoeducation. We hope the books may also instigate discussion and we are open to the possibility of trialling a reading group if members believe it would be useful. |
| Recipient Org: Web Address | https://www.rethink.org/help-in-your-area/support-groups/support-together-southend-group/ |