Communitydialogue

Working Lunch 18 Dec: Progress

Naim and I were really pleased with the turnout for our working lunch at Saint Peter's Health Centre this week.

12 guests attended, from a range of local community groups including SureStart, BuilD, Ansaar and the Pakistan Youth & Community Association. We had delicious healthy food to eat, lively discussion and I captured the key points of our 3 hour get- together using my new graphic recording skills. (The feedback to this was very encouraging, it went down a storm!).

Naim, our Community Health Development worker for Highfields said

I thought it went very well, the contribution from the attendees was very positive. The meeting opened up some very frank and interesting discussions on how we can address the issues around cook and eat and it was encouraging to see people taking ownership in wanting to take this initiative forward.

What next?

I will update all our Highfields contacts with the outcome of our working lunch, forward the graphicing images and set some objectives for January 2009; namely, for them to have a think about the enthusiastic volunteers in their respective communities that we can get involved in the project.

Working Lunch event

I have uploaded our invite to the Highfields Cook & Eat, Working Lunch event.  I thought this might be useful if you are arranging similar public events for your own projects.

Please note, this is NOT an open invitation!  As much as Naim and I would love to have you all over for lunch, we do have limited resources ;-)

View the invite here:  Download invite_textfinal.pdf

Date With The Doctor

...no, not a sci-fi adventure in the Tardis!  Something far more exciting; a meeting with Dr Kerbel of the Saffron Group Practice.  This was a positive step forward in the project and it is essential that we have insight into all the people involved with mental health in the area.

Dr Kerbel kindly talked me through some of his patient scenarios and the pathway that people might expect to follow, if they come to surgery with symptoms of depression and anxiety. 

A key thing that I wanted to ask him about was the resources available to GPs for signposting to community groups and therapies.  Dr Kerbel spoke favourably of LAMP http://www.lampdirect.org.uk/ , though the withdrawal of funding for this resource was an obvious barrier (can anyone out there elaborate on this?)

Interestingly, when I passed on the positive feedback from our residents group about the benefits of treatments like massage and reiki, Dr Kerbel made the connection between affluence and access to such treatments. 

Could we look at an initiative to get therapists involved on a voluntary basis?  And there's our idea of training our locals in some of these therapies too....

All in all a very good meeting and Dr Kerbel said that he (and hopefully some of his colleagues) would be willing to come and do a practical workshop / role-play excercise with our Keeping Saffron in Mind residents group.  This aims to improve understanding of local views and aspirations and fill in the gaps in service and resources that Saffron people want and need.

A Night At The SAFTAs

We had a great night at the SAFTAs last week, with Karen Pickering and our volunteers from Keeping Saffron in Mind.  The awards ceremony was held at the Samworth Enterprise Academy, which is an impressive new school located in the Saffron area.  It appeared to be a respected and well-liked landmark in this community, which is crucial for us to explore.

The SAFTAs celebrated local volunteers that were really making a difference, and also included a detailed participatory budget (PB) excercise.  I'd learnt about PB in a recent empowerment training course - but it was exciting to see it in action.  It's a wonderful example of communities taking ownership of funds and resources. (If you would like more info on how this worked, feel free to contact me).

Young people from the area were invited to perform dance and drama as part of the event, which gave the night a fun and uplifting feeling.  

Alison Kirk and I had the opportunity to present our work in Saffron, this was great as there were around 300 residents in the audience.  We encouraged more people to get involved.  It will be interesting to see how many people join the project, as a result of the SAFTAs and to develop some of the valuable partnerships that we made on the night.

It's worth sharing the comments of one of our Keeping Saffron in Mind volunteers, on the night; This person is severely affected by anxiety in his life and to our amazement stood up on the stage and addressed a  huge crowd of strangers, to tell them about the impact that volunteers in Saffron have had. When I congratulated him on the speech, he told me that watching the video clip of Ryan at our last meeting, had inspired him to stand up and speak out.  WOW!