Author: Miriam Leighton

Anam Cara is a charity run by women, for women, in East and Midlothian. They offer a programme of workshops aimed at empowering and supporting women to improve their wellbeing by learning how to develop better self-care and coping mechanisms. Anam Cara is motivated by its three core values of compassion, courage and connection, which run through all of the projects and activities that the organisation provides.

Anam Cara helps women who are at risk of slipping through the net of other services that can help them, therefore missing out on the support they need. This can include women in unpaid caring roles, those with substance use issues or other health and wellbeing issues that they need additional support to deal with. Their approach is forward thinking and non-judgemental, with a focus on prevention, harm reduction and early intervention to support the mental health needs of women, particularly those from more vulnerable or deprived communities. As such, Anam Cara was well placed to receive a grant in Year 1 of the Midlothian Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund.

The organisation successfully obtained £8,456 from the Fund to put towards salary and equipment costs for peer support activities with women, including monthly meet-ups and extended one-to-one support that had initially taken root during the first lockdown. In Autumn 2022, we checked in with Marion and Karyn from Anam Cara to see how their projects were developing.

What goes on at Anam Cara?

Every woman who comes to Anam Cara is invited to take a 4-week wellbeing course consisting of live workshops plus access to around 70 online short videos covering a wide range of topics. The videos were a more recent addition aimed at reducing barriers to participation due to information retention difficulties and poor attention span among some participants. They have proved very useful for practicing wellbeing skills in short bursts and have allowed participants much greater flexibility in their uptake of Anam Cara’s services.

“The online wellbeing videos are like a medicine cabinet of information. They give you the chance to develop and revisit these skills and keep on top of your mental health.”

Karyn, lead volunteer with Anam Cara and Midlothian Volunteer of the Year 2022.

Women are also encouraged to repeat the course 1-2 years after initially completing it, because Anam Cara know how useful it is to receive support over a longer period, as life evolves and different challenges come to the fore. They understand that someone may come back to Anam Cara and learn something new, not only due to personal circumstances but because the course itself is constantly being reviewed and improved.

The Sanctuary

The community orientated focus of the Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund links particularly well to Anam Cara’s core value of connection. The grant enabled Anam Cara to develop their Sanctuary drop-in service, where women needing a sense of connection and togetherness with other women have a safe and welcoming space to meet. The Sanctuary offers refresher workshops for women who have already completed Anam Cara’s main programme of workshops, allowing them another chance to practice the mindfulness and wellbeing techniques they learned initially. This is especially important as the programme relies on continued engagement in order to be most effective.

Within the Sanctuary, there are a variety of activities on offer including aromatherapy, holistic healing work, dance classes and more. Each of these activities is centred around improving and preserving good mental health and aims to give women the social connection they need to develop a sense of belonging. Feedback from participants has shown that attending workshops helps women to feel less isolated and alone, whilst also encouraging them to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining when looking after their mental health. Women coming to workshops show positive differences in their outlook even from week one.

Maria, the founder of Anam Cara, believes that this is a result of the organisation’s services being comparatively unique, in that they allow women to gather and support each other in ways that derive from a place of personal experience. There is a very low drop-out rate at Anam Cara, suggesting that its services are not only empowering and inspiring, but effective. Women are learning to reflect on their mental processes, how their minds work, and why they behave the ways they do. They are learning to respond to unhealthy behaviours with better choices, enabling them to move forward and make significant changes in their lives.

“Anam Cara was my only open door. It has strengthened my wellbeing, opened mental pathways, and helped me to develop a safety net to support and protect me. Women here are learning to embrace life and learn tools for their future. It is so important for women to have an option like this that doesn’t just involve hospitals or medication but focusses on togetherness and wellbeing as well.”

Karyn

Future Plans

Moving forward, Anam Cara would like to develop a service focussing specifically on women in later life. Maria had noticed that women in the 45+ age group were going through major life changes, often stepping into unpaid caring roles for elderly parents, whilst dealing with the stress of family life, menopause and sometimes finding themselves using alcohol or other substances to cope – sometimes also working into their 60s or even 70’s. Addressing this unique set of challenges alongside older women is a key future goal for Anam Cara.

Anam Cara are also looking to expand their bank of volunteers to accommodate the increasing need for befriending calls, and to potentially offer the Sanctuary up to women to run themselves as an independent project for users of the service. It all sounds really priomising and we can’t wait to see how Anam Cara develops this work in future. It’s fantastic to see that alongside the other grants they receive, the Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund has enabled continued development of this valuable local organisation for women in Midlothian.

MAEDT is a community development trust dedicated to creating opportunities and improving outcomes for the local community of Mayfield and Easthouses. A key value of the Trust is to work towards alleviating poverty. With that goal in mind, MAEDT runs a wide range of different projects that share one key thing in common: the creation of long-term solutions for local people.

MAEDT has been running since 2007 and new projects are continuously being introduced, including the Community Food Pantry which recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. As well as the pantry, MAEDT runs and hosts projects including a school uniform bank, debt and energy clinics, drop-in sessions with the local Citizens Advice Bureau, employability support, a men’s mental health group, a kinship carers group and a ‘wheelbeing’ hub for bicycle repairs and socialising. Central to these groups and projects is MAEDT’s pavilion, community garden and café, where a hub of different activities take place on a daily basis, come rain or shine.

MAEDT’s Pantry and Pavilion

Over the last 2 years, MAEDT saw how the pandemic increased unemployment and food bank referrals in the Mayfield and Easthouses area. Wanting to focus on reducing food poverty and improving people’s access to healthy food, MAEDT introduced a community food pantry. ‘The Pantry’ is a shop where food items are marked as either 1 or 2 credits each, and shoppers can buy 10 credits for £3.50. In addition to the credits, members are offered free fresh fruit and vegetables, sanitary products and bakery items.

To shop at the Pantry, individuals must become members. This free requirement helps to create a sense of equality among staff and users, so that people can be open about what they need and when they need it. The get-to-know-you membership model has helped people to feel comfortable in sharing personal stories about their mental health, challenges within their home life and stressors they are experiencing. It has become a hub where trust between local people can grow.

The Pantry helps to remove the stigma associated with accessing free and discounted food, providing resources that are much needed in a dignified and empowering way. Rather than feeling shame about not being able to afford food or cook from scratch with it, members are encouraged to broaden their cooking knowledge, introduce new flavours and be imaginative with healthy ingredients. Additionally, buying more affordable food from The Pantry means that members can put money towards other essentials such as energy bills, making this a service that helps in more ways than one.

The outside space at MAEDT’s ‘Pavilion’ hub underpins a lot of their work. Gardening activities act as vehicles for volunteering, community payback and rehabilitation. Using the garden in these ways is a non-stigmatising option for people belonging to vulnerable groups and can help them to better manage their own wellbeing. Moreover, the garden offers a safe space for people to improve their mental health by making connections with others, their community, and with nature. Local women Sharon Hill, who is also the manager at MAEDT, explained to us that individuals volunteering together at the Pavilion learn to bring out skills in one another, for example using maths to plot out a garden project, or conversation skills to engage with other volunteers who may find socialising difficult.

“All of our volunteers offer something unique; a skill, knowledge or vulnerability that can help bring out something in another person.“

Sharon Hill, MAEDT Manager.

How was the Fund used?

Part of the grant that MAEDT received from the Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund was used to pay for MAEDT’s Enterprise Development Worker, so that the Pavillion could open more often. The funding also paid for a structure in the garden called a Polycrub, as well as a pergola, making the expansion of gardening projects for volunteers possible.

What next?

MAEDT is always looking to the future and thinking about what the community in Mayfield and Easthouses will need next. Aside from the impending cost of living crisis and responding to what looks set to be a difficult winter, ideas for upcoming projects include a sensory park, an electronic rickshaw, and collaboration with partner organisations to embed the pantry model in other areas. For other places in Midlothian to set up their own pantry initiative, a large, centralised project would need to be organised to ensure that food is being dispersed equally. Sharon’s idea would be to use MEADT’s Pavilion as the central location for donations, and to use it as a network hub for distribution.

Reaching this point has taken several years of hard work from MAEDT volunteers and those who work for the organisation in a paid capacity, but it certainly seems as though all the hard work has been worth it. We applaud the team for their worthwhile efforts, and we look forward to supporting the Trust with its ongoing development in the years ahead.

Bonnyrigg Rose Community FC (CFC) is a football club that is gaining recognition for its work championing mental health and wellbeing in Midlothian. As such, it was one of four local charities to receive a larger grant from the Midlothian Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund in 2022. A total of £36,884 was awarded via Midlothian Third Sector Interface to enable the ongoing development of services for local people, including peer support groups, mental health training courses and refurbishments to the club’s community hub building.

The way the BRCFC’s staff and trustees see it, football and mental health are deeply inter-connected. It wasn’t always this way however, because prior to 2019 the club’s main concern had been to ensure that its ageing astro-pitch was replaced. Community programmes were seen as being important, but up until that point they had been viewed as more of a side project to football related activities.

A pivotal moment came when the club held a special one-off community event in the summer of 2019, with the input of Midlothian Council’s Communities and Lifelong Learning team. At the event local people were asked about what their town needed and what they wanted from the club, by completing a survey tool known as the ‘Place Standard’. The responses gathered highlighted that Bonnyrigg lacked groups and activities for older people, as well as needing more targeted opportunities for young people. It also became clear that the club had the potential to play a role in championing grassroots mental health initiatives. This meant moving beyond a focus on sport alone, embedding themes such as wellbeing and connectedness more deeply throughout the club’s community programmes.

Since 2019 the club has worked with organisations such as Health in Mind to expand the delivery of initiatives including ‘Midlothian Men Matter’. BRCFC’s premises also provides space for several groups which help to reduce loneliness and isolation among local people. Given the high rates of suicide among young men in Scotland and the club’s ability to reach this target group through football and sport, an key date in the calendar for Bonnyrigg Rose is Suicide Prevention Week, which takes place every year in September. To raise awareness of this issue, the club has hosted free Mental Health First Aid training for anyone in Midlothian with an interest in attending. Group based coaching work with younger men who are struggling to cope has also been a feature of the club’s provision over the past 18 months, alongside school-based wellbeing programmes, yoga, free counselling and peer support activities.

We caught up with Trish Sime (Development Manager) and Jim Wilson (General Manager), a few months after they received the club’s grant from the Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund, to find out what has been achieved so far. Trish and Jim explained that the Fund has given them more freedom to continue linking football and mental health together by giving them additional resources – including core staffing hours – to focus in on progressing their plans for more community-based provision. Knowing that physical space is a particularly important resource and in short supply, the club got to work quickly in using their capital grant to replace old windows in the community hub building, making it a warmer and more welcoming facility. By investing in physical spaces where people can connect with each other more, the club is paving the way for further investments in community mental health and wellbeing.

Having charted the huge efforts made by BRCFC to support mental health and wellbeing in Midlothian, the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) found that the impact of community participation in the club was worth an amazing £3.95 million. This commendable achievement is underpinned by UEFA’s commitment to support the club and its activities in the longer term, helping to build an even stronger foundation for the involvement of the community in helping to decide on future priorities (not just those that related to football)

Speaking about the connection between sport, community and mental health, Trish Sime told us:

“Sport brings people together. Through teamwork and a positive attitude, relationships are fostered, and trust is created. People rely on their teammates, friends, and peers to help them through challenges – both on the field and off. Using the power of football and sport in general to talk openly about mental health and to break the stigma is positive, and it’s the right thing to do.”

Trish Sime

We couldn’t say it better than that, and we’re keen to see what comes next for the club because the future for BRCFC looks bright. You can follow BRCFC on Twitter or check out the main BRFC club website for more info about what they are up to.