The one thing the team want you to know
Take a moment right now to bring someone to mind – a friend, colleague, neighbour, service user, family member – who you know is really struggling, whether financially, emotionally, physically, mentally, maybe a combination. Close your eyes and feel into how life is for them………
Now imagine inviting them into a room – the door opens, the light is soft, the air still and peaceful. The floor is warmly laid with blankets, cushions, soft seating, wellbeing books, and drawing materials. They sit down and take a deep breath. They can come back here again.
Now how do they feel?
Project description
WHO
Care Nest Plymouth CIC is a socially-purposed organisation based in Stonehouse. Moving into our 5th year of delivering relational wellbeing services, we provide opportunities for local people to directly experience, engage with, and learn from a variety of relational wellbeing practices. The purpose of this work is to help guide, empower, and better equip our clients as they explore, acknowledge, and actively respond to their needs, interests, and concerns.
WHAT
Our plan is to host 2-hour Daily Cause to Pause sessions (Mon – Sun) for a 3-month period, inviting local adults (15 max per session) to drop-in for any length of time and rest together with others in silence. During each session, participants will have access to yoga mats, chairs, blankets, cushions, hot water bottles, wellbeing reading/drawing/writing materials, water, and toilet facilities. The only rules participants will be asked to follow are: NO shoes/food/talking/devices. There will always be at least one Care Nest staff member present during each session to ensure it remains as welcoming, safe, and comfortable as possible for all.
WHY
We’ve listened attentively throughout our years of delivery to the countless stories our clients have shared of their experiences, and have witnessed a commonly shared journey between them that starts with some kind of struggle, progresses into stress, then overwhelm, followed by an inability to act, and finally ends in isolation. What our evaluative processes and client testimonials have taught us is that by accessing our ‘quiet-based’ activities, clients have over time been able to vastly improve their wellbeing by learning how to pause, slow down, listen to themselves, reflect, make wiser choices, practice better self-care, and subsequently recover their self-worth and resilience. Life is noisy, messy, demanding, and uncertain; and there are almost no public spaces (not focused on entertainment, consumption, or religion) available for people to just be together without these distractions interrupting their attention. Our Daily Cause for Pause sessions aim to help fill this gap.
IMPACT
In order to gather evidence for the impact of this work, those who attend sessions will be invited to capture and share their experiences anonymously on paper. These trails of written/drawn feedback will be visually displayed within the space for others to see. Global Plymouth (University of Plymouth) have also stated their direct support for this project, within which they are very keen to collate and research this feedback academically.
Funding needed £4995
What group or groups of people will the project be working with and why?
These sessions will specifically be for adults (18+) who live, work, or move within the Stonehouse area, and who identify as being somewhere on the journey between struggle→ stress→ overwhelm→ inability to act→ isolation. We know that Stonehouse is a highly deprived area of Plymouth, and that outside the city centre, it is also the area most affected by crime (Plymouth City Council 2020 neighbourhood statistics). Therefore, many of these local people may well be closer to the stage of ‘inability to act / isolation’ within their struggles, and may subsequently feel desperate to gain access to a regular space that is safe, quiet, comfortable, and restful. In order to reach and engage with this particular group of people, we’ll tap into our well established network of venues, organisations, and community members local to us through informal conversation and welcoming.
What areas will the project be working in?1 neighbourhood
Stonehouse/Millbay
What is the group or organisations track record? Track record:
Been going for a few years
How new is the idea? Experimentation:
Been delivering for years
Budget
Salaries & peoples time 75%
Project costs 25%
Event/hire/rent 0%
IT spend 0%
Core costs 0%
Capital 0%
Organisations involved
Global Plymouth (in association with University of Plymouth)
