This March the Moray Wellbeing Hub project completed it’s year of funding and celebrated by visiting Moray local communities with a seminar and taster sessions on, raising awareness in mental health, stigma and self-management.
Below is an extract from our final report, to be shared in full later this month, which gives an overview of what we did and why. We also hope to share with you reflections from our champions about their experiences of the events as these are submitted.
MWH Café Event Feedback
Prezi from celebration event on 31st March – Additionally you may wish to look at our Prezi presentation that we delivered at the final event. This will be updated for the website with an audio track in the coming weeks as another accessible version of our report.
March events: Six hub community events reached over 215 people in Forres, Buckie, Lossiemouth, Dufftown, Keith and Elgin.
These gave us amazing opportunities to try out new venues, create new partnerships, connect with diverse local communities, and provide champions opportunities for empowerment. We used this opportunity in local communities to tie in as many activities as we could, including our social enterprise launch and birthday celebration.
The events were open from afternoon to evening to capture the widest range of audiences to fit in with their commitments of work and caring roles. We provided a marketplace and alongside promoting the hub concept, our peer led self-management courses, and anti-stigma awareness raising resources, we promoted other local organisations that shared our values. This meant that we ran a schedule of tasters not only of our self-management tools, but that partners ran these as well.
MWH Event – Lossiemouth
Another element of our delivery at our March events was the seminar entitled –“What can I do to help?” Tips to become a more confident supporter”. The design of this anti-stigma and self-management promoting 1.5hour training was in partnership with the volunteer coordinators from the third sector and Moray Health & Social Care. The aim was to solve a challenge they approached us with in providing training to volunteers who were geographically widespread, not yet motivated sufficiently for a standardised peer-led course such as WRAP, and without resources to run additional project to our existing activities. This lead to a close partnership approach that was very successful – they gained the required training for their team without extra resources, whilst we had a guaranteed audience for seminars from the public, who in turn further promoted the events in their networks and signed up for future activities such as peer groups, courses and as champions.
MWH WRAP Taster Session – Forres
Delivering large events at the end of the project made best use of the funding, in terms of human resources and publicity as people, partners and public, had begun to be more aware of us. By January the champions team was robust and empowered through the previous year’s support to fully engage with a large-scale series of events, prior to this the project lead would never have been able to deliver this level of activity. As a team we split the planning, promotion and delivery of the events by firstly area (i.e. those with local knowledge chose the venues and suggested fellow local partners to join our marketplace), then by skills and interest ( i.e. those who were now WRAP facilitators ran the taster sessions).
Despite significant efforts in local promotion, planning and networking from the champions, and the wider promotion in the media and partners, some areas had very poor responses compared to others. Forres and Elgin were attended very well, but the others were quite low in numbers. That said feedback from those who did come showed that often in local areas quality of interaction outweighed quantity. Over all local people, the champions, partners and public, were delighted we would come to their area, raising expectations and empowering the community. It showed the hub was not Elgin centric and it provided future sustainability in a variety of ways – linking with emerging peer support groups, giving opportunities for champions to deliver activity and be visible in their local area as a leader of change, as well as recruiting new champions and working alongside partners that share our values.
MWH Event – Lossiemouth Stall
