Published on: August 22, 2024
This summer, Compass Changing Lives have been working with Parkside High CIC Youth Organisation to support their Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme.
Changing Lives’ Ilkeston Mental Health Support Team have joined the programme once a week to deliver wellbeing craft activities to the young people taking part.
Parkside High are a grassroots youth organisation based in Ilkeston that offers activities, support and alternative learning opportunities for children and young people in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Their HAF programme is a programme of affordable events and food provision for children and young people aged 8-14 that receive free school meals.
Practitioners from the Ilkeston MHST worked with participants on creative activities that were intended to be fun and inspire conversations about emotional wellbeing. Children made their own stress balls, from balloons and flour, that they could use to alleviate anxiety. They constructed “positivity cubes”, square toys with positive affirmations written on all sides. They also made “grass heads”, which are cups filled with soil and grass seeds, with faces drawn on them. As children tend and nurture their grass head, the grass will grow like hair on the top of their head.
These craft activities provided a starting point for informal conversations between participants and practitioners. Some of these were focused on the task itself, about working as a team and the wellbeing principles that inspired the crafts. But they also allowed broader conversations about participant’s own experiences and interests, including around mental health.
By linking with the Parkside High HAF programme, Changing Lives and their practitioners have an opportunity to make inroads with the local community, and build positive relationships with children they might not be able to connect with otherwise.
The hope is that, through increased awareness of the service and a familiarity with the practitioners, mental health support will be normalised in the community, and that this will lead to children and young people feeling comfortable asking for help at an earlier stage.
Hannah Johnson, Supervising Practitioner for the Ilkeston MHST, had this to say:
“Practitioners have really enjoyed engaging with children and young people through creative activities, we hope this continues to break the stigma around mental health and allows our service to be increasingly visible within the local Ilkeston community.”
Sam Whittaker, Mental Health Practitioner, added:
“We have enjoyed spending time with the children from our local schools at Parkside HAF. It is such a lovely space for them to have fun and be supported. The staff are brilliantly supportive to our Ilkeston Changing Lives team and we enjoy a great collaboration.”
This is the second year Changing Lives has joined Parkside High for their HAF programme, and they are already looking at what they would do next year. Children and young people that took part were so enthusiastic about the programme this year that they made a number of suggestions for activities for 2025.
Children , community , Derby and Derbyshire Mental Health Support , partnerships