Collaborators
- Wellbeing Workshops Devon CIC
- Colebrook SW
- Memory Matters (Moments Café)
Describe your aims and ideas
Wellbeing Workshops, Colebrook and Memory Matters will work together to produce and deliver dementia friendly and inclusive wellbeing workshops to the community. According to WHO (2021) the covid pandemic has greatly increased the health and socioeconomic factors that contribute to poor mental health. One major barrier still is the stigma that is related to talking about mental health and wellbeing, we would like to provide a safe space for the community to come in and reflect on wellbeing within a different light. A recent report completed by the Lancet COVID-19 community recommends the use of positive psychology methods to improve wellbeing and positive emotions, as a low-cost evidence-based strategy which improves community wellbeing and increases positive emotions. Our workshops include elements of positive psychology, paired with other evidence-based topics which have been shown to impact wellbeing.
We plan to deliver 12, 2-hour workshops across 6 weeks. One on a weekday and one on a weekend to make the workshops accessible for more people, in total we will aim to have 20-30 participants across both sites. At each workshop the participants will be provided with free coffee and cake and given a safe space to develop their understanding of wellbeing and happiness.
The workshops at Moments café on a Saturday will continue at the same time and location which we used within the life after lockdown proposal, this is because the location and day was convenient for the community, and they have expressed a desire for these to continue. These workshops will aim to add to the current participants previous knowledge and understanding and explore wellbeing and happiness even further, adding to their pre-existing knowledge, skills and understanding. As we have already has established a connection with this community group, we have asked them for suggestions of topics they would like to explore further, and these were some of their common suggestions:
- Reducing Stress
- Managing depression, anxiety, and panic attacks
- Eating disorders – e.g. anorexia
- Sleep
- Healthy Eating
- Social Media
Within our previous life after lockdown workshop series our workshops at Miles Mitchell Hall were less popular, feedback from the community suggested that this was due to location. Therefore, we would like to create a new series of workshops that will be delivered from the St Budeaux Wellbeing Hub in collaboration with Colebrook SW. We will follow the following topics within these workshops as these are the core topics we always start with to help individuals develop their basic knowledge and understanding of wellbeing:
- Wellbeing – What is wellbeing and what does it mean to you? A reflection on their current wellbeing.
- Happiness – What is happiness? A look into different types of happiness and creating a happiness toolkit.
- Identity – What makes you, you? A look into meaning and purpose from a humanistic and positive psychology view.
- Mindset – what mindset do you currently think you have? How can we use what we have learnt in the pandemic to shape and change this?
- Managing Emotions – What are emotions? Understanding different coping strategies and reflecting on your own.
- Managing your wellbeing going forward – What is rewirement and what does it mean? Creating an action plan for you to take forward.
It is important to note that Wellbeing Workshops reflects upon each workshop and alters the way they deliver to the specific community group and their needs.We also collect quantitative and qualitative data to enable us to measure the impact of our workshops.
Describe how will you work together to achieve this.
Wellbeing Workshops, Colebrook and Memory Matters have worked before on a previous POP grant life after lockdown, we successfully delivered 2 six-week wellbeing workshops courses within the community and have created an impact report from this. Within the previous workshops the following impact was noted: 50% of participants demonstrated an improved subjective wellbeing score, 100% said they would like to attend more workshops and 90% indicated that the workshops have improved their knowledge of wellbeing. The impact report also noted that longer term intervention is required to enable the community to have time to apply the skills knowledge and understanding, we are in the process of trying to secure this however we require a short-term solution to be able to continue to provide the workshops to the community.
As part of this bid Colebrook SW will provide community premises, refreshments, and staff to support the program for 2hpw for 6 weeks. Colebrook SW will also market the program through our social media, wellbeing hub, Colebrook’s support services and other networks as well as the diverse range of community members we work with. Memory matters will work with all organisations to ensure the workshops are dementia friendly, provide a warm, caring, friendly environment for workshops including refreshments and staffing for 2hpw over 6 weeks. As well as promoting this within the moments café as we want to start more groups/workshops, which are Dementia friendly and inclusive to all, and we feel this is a perfect place to start. Each organisation has completed ‘Exploring dementia training’ which was funded by our life after lockdown bid. Wellbeing workshops will plan, create, deliver, and evaluate the bespoke workshops, whilst also creating marketing material and marketing the workshops and working with both organisations to get the word out. Our core strength is the ability to learn about the people we have within our workshops and adapt our workshops to suite them, we are not a one fit all organisation and pride ourselves within this. We deliver engaging, interactive, and thought-provoking workshops which embed topics that our evidence based to positively impact wellbeing.
Both Memory Matters and Colebrook will also provide first-hand insight into the mentality and issues currently seen within the direct communities they are working with daily. This will enable Wellbeing Workshops to create and deliver impactful and relevant workshops to the communities. We will all work with together to measure and evaluate the impact that the workshops have had within the community. We have chosen to continue working together as each organisations morals and values align regarding our focus on wellbeing and improving mental health within the community. Also, each organisation has a specific specialty which will help support us to deliver high quality wellbeing content and have an impact on the communities we work within. As well as this, each organisation understands community needs, they have expressed a desire for a change of location for and for the workshops to continue the same within the other format, we believe that it is important for us to listen and respond to their needs, giving them a safe and accessible space to talk about wellbeing.
Our collective operates on shared values – (People-focused, Compassionate, Open, Positive, Creative & Fun) and we believe this is an amazing opportunity for us to create positive change throughout Plymouth. We want to continue our offer to the community by maintaining this project to create a stable support network for people in the community and enabling them to develop knowledge and understanding on how to manage their own wellbeing going forward.
