Community Wellbeing

The funding will be used to enable us to deliver two, six week in-person wellbeing workshop series, one in the Moments Cafe and one in the St Budeaux and Barne Barton Wellbeing Hub to improve the community’s ability to be able to manage and maintain their own wellbeing and mental health. The topics will cover elements of positive psychology including: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishments as well as helping the community to develop a tool kit of coping strategies they can use throughout their life span.

We believe that the project will improve approximately 15 members of the community’s subjective wellbeing, ability to manage their own emotions, improve self confidence, increase social connection and reduce loneliness and equip them with a tool kit of coping strategies they can use within the future. The community group who attend our workshops struggle with their mental health and experience high levels of loneliness, depression and anxiety, we also have found that our workshops help them to manage and understand their emotions in more depths around these topics. Previously 66% of participants demonstrated an improved subjective wellbeing score, 100% said they would like to attend more workshops and 100% indicated that the workshops have improved their knowledge of wellbeing. The age range of those who attended varied from 30-96 years old. Also, previously the theme of the qualitative feedback indicated that the community developed a handful of skills and knowledge to help them to manage their own mental health and wellbeing. Whilst also developing a sense of community around mental health and wellbeing by sharing similar struggles. Therefore, we believe that the workshops will also help to reduce stigma around mental health and increase sense of community, which are both linked to positive psychological wellbeing.

In order to measure the impact of this workshop series we will continue to collect both quantitative and qualitative feedback, using the WEMWBS questionnaire to measure subjective wellbeing and collect data at the beginning and end of the workshop series and also use open ended questions to collect qualitative feedback and perfuming a thematic analysis on this. Also, based on previous feedback we will also measure the ‘ripple effect’ of the project and measure the bigger impact that we have on individuals.

We are an established collective who have worked together on several different projects, we formed early in 2022 and found each other organically and through networking. 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. The Moments Cafe and St Budeaux and Barne Barton wellbeing hub have access to the facilities and already have great relationships with the local community and Wellbeing Workshops Devon CIC provided the expertise to deliver bespoke wellbeing workshops for the community groups and we want to continue this work.