A visiting bear checks out the Men’s Shed stall
Champions Chris and Kenny pose behind Craig’s kindness jars and the hub ‘Guess the love in the jar’ competition
The Moray Wellbeing Hub went along to the Rrrrally event in Keith for the first time. We brought along our usual brightly coloured stall and a few Champions to take shifts throughout the day. We were delighted to find we were next door to the Fochabers Men’s Shed (who kept their stash of biscuits wisely away from us).
The next piece of great news was finding out we also had the chance to share our stall with a fantastic young man challenging stigma in the local area.
Craig was the star of the show!
Craig takes on an event managment role and organises the hub champions at our stall
Craig had got his parents to help him organised a ‘buddy bench’ for his school. He made a model of it, engaged the the Men’s Shedders to make it, painted it with his friend in lovely bright colours, and now often waits on it ready to help anyone lonely at school. Not just that but Craig is also a young entrepreneur, as he had brought along his homemade hope jars to sell in aid of the Men’s Shed on our stall. We have truly yet to see a better example of a future hub Champion!
It’s good to promote the hub in a worthwhile way
For our part, we handed our Random Acts of Kindness, and on the whole, folk were delighted to take one and here about what we do. It’s a tricky thing sometimes to chat about mental health and not sound too much like a health campaign, so we also tried engaging with folk using a ‘Guess the sweets in the jar’ approach. That both helped pay for our table at the event and pulled in a completely different crowd.
It was an enjoyable experience. Loved chatting with people about things in general.
Margaret Cowie, Volunteer coordinator at Moray Council, receives a very apt act of kindness inspiration
The event itself is a great family event with food, craft stalls, the firefighters cutting folk out a car, young folk running stalls to throw wellies about and all manner of things in between. I think in the future we would love to bring our pop-up cafe and emotional baking to the event, but perhaps get a pitch outside where the action was (and the firefighters!).
Weekend events like these can really can take it out of us as Champions if we have also been running training and other events in the week. What was great was the rota system that meant we were not there too long, and it encouraged some different faces to come along for whom other events are too far usually. I noticed that because we were tired it was easier to take the occasional rejection harder when folk won’t chat or refuse to take a kindness from you. People are suspicious of what we do because it’s different, and it just proves we need to do it more!
Today was positive, interesting and rather quiet at times, but company was good as always 🙂
