Suffolk County Council's #BeWellSuffolk campaign is concentrating on 'Community' in August. Being part of a community, whether it's a friendship group, a sport, a hobby, a work group - finding your 'tribe' is great for our physical and mental wellbeing. This is something we completely agree with and weave into our services.
Our Community Connectors Service (CCS) aim is to find our service users the right support for their mental health. Just recently our team had their first picnic in Christchurch Park in Ipswich, with 9 Service Users attending. They had lunch, had a game of Frisbee and enjoyed ice cream. After the session, some of the Community Connectors service users decided to go along and support a football session being run by Bruce from our STARS (Supporting Treatment, Accommodation & Recovery in Suffolk), service for service users in the park. Several of the CCS service users decided to support the footballers regularly, just for something else to do together.
The service users that attended got to have some face-to-face support from our team, as well as the chance to socialise in the sun, meet new people and feel part of the Connect Community!
Sally, our Service User Engagement Officer, also went along and shared some SU engagement flyers and discussed future events and the possibility of starting a badminton session to see who would be interested. In the words of one of the attendees that day in the park: “This beats staring at the four walls, at home, all alone!” The team said it was nice to see smiles all round and people opening up and talking about some of their issues.
Thank you to our CC team for arranging this, you are making such a difference to people’s lives with these events.