Welcome to our new regular update which will help us keep you posted with what is happening at Mind Your Head. April and May have been quite busy months behind the scenes and here is a very quick summary of the main things which have been happening.
We have agreed to sponsor the SFA Reserve League in 2014. This again gives us the opportunity to work alongside local footbal teams in promoting mental health positively. They, in return, provide volunteers to help us marshall our Fun Run. Registration has been opened for this year's Fun Run.
We have been working alongside our colleagues at Choose Life to bring together the findings from the 'Let's talk about suicide prevention' engagement last autumn. We hope the action plan will make a difference locally and we look forward to being part of that really important work in the community.
Chris, our Project Worker, has been busy doing a project called 'Minders' in Brae school, which aimed to tackle stigma. We are looking forward to seeing the work created by all the young people who were involved in that project later in June. They have made a short film and created a series of information posters and banners which tackle stigma and raise awareness of mental health.
Thanks to a personal donation, a 3 day recovery workshop was hosted last week for local carers, SIC staff and 3rd sector mental health workers. The course was entitled 'Working to recovery' and provided our team members with much food for thought as we work toward developing and launching our own support service in the community.
Meanwhile, we have also been developing our own community training programmes which we intend to launch in the autumn of this year. We will keep you posted on our website of progress. We are also developing a new look website which we hope to launch in August and will include an expanded section providing even more information on mental health and wellbeing.
Chris has also be busy developing the content for our men's mental health campaign which will be launched during the summer months. That will include Mind Your Head going in to work places (e.g. engineering firms, builders, etc). Our Real Life Stories project will also finally reach completion after unexpected delays at the back end of 2013. We hope to have all of these live on our website in the next 6 weeks, published in the Shetland Times as well as our film shared via our website.
The other main piece of work has been our community survey which we launched in April. Thanks to everyone who contributed to that important piece of work. The findings will be made public in September at the latest and will be shared with the NHS, SIC as well as partner mental health service providers.
