Sefton In Mind Blog: The Venus Charity
Sefton In Mind are running a yearlong promotional campaign to raise awareness of the fantastic services we have in Sefton that provide support to people who are struggling with their mental health.
A Q&A with Venus
What is the primary purpose of your organisation?
Supporting women, young people and individuals
5 key themes of Sefton In Mind are ‘Connect, Be Active, Take Notice, Keep Learning and Give’. How you enable and encourage people to do so?
Connection – Recent times have reinforced how important connection is to people, who will forget what it meant to be isolated, through wellbeing groups, and one to one we actively encourage clients to attend our groups to facilitate positive social interactions, sometimes an informal chat is as therapeutic as a formal interaction. By encouraging all our staff and volunteers to listen we endeavour to provide connection wherever we can, making friends and connecting with other people is important for everyone’s wellbeing. Connection is super important and enables us to facilitate great community interactions, we partner with lots of other local organisations to offer the best service for our community. Our open access service is open daily to provide a service where anyone can drop in, either to solve an issue or to stop and chat.
Be active – through promotion of local groups such as walking groups, yoga, gardening groups, and local exercise programmes, we can find something for everyone, during summer months we also attend activity centres as part of our residential programmes where everyone gets to try new activities, such as bouldering, sailing, and abseiling. We often arrange more informal walks when the weather is good, just a different space can really impact mood, we are lucky enough to have a minibus that we can hop on and go to the local beach. Our partnership with the canal and river trust will mean we can provide more formal walking groups in the local area (and do some clearing of the area which is a very ‘be active’ task)
Take notice – we encourage everyone to take notice of each other and the environment around them, we have adopted part of the local canal (through canal and river trust) and encourage our groups to have a small walk on the canal stretch to notice things like the wildlife, weather, noise and nature, as noticing the small things can really impact on bigger perspective. We work with partners who attend our sessions, such as living well Sefton and May logan centre who help us to encourage health checks such as weight and blood pressure, stop smoking services noticing any health changes is important to all round wellbeing. In addition to this we encourage people to take notice of things about themselves and their friends and family, taking notice of changes can literally be life changing.
Keep learning – we are always learning, and we positively encourage learning new things, our step together group wrote a song, our makers group knit and sew, we have great links with local partners such as adult education centres and Sefton at work, and we help members of our community access these services, often accompanying them and attending the first session. One of the most important learning skills we facilitate is money management and budgeting, this impacts everyone and is a skill we are always learning about.
Give – we encourage giving through our volunteer services, time is precious, and our volunteers provide an amazing service of giving up their own valuable time, the impact of giving affects their own wellbeing and we actively encourage this by facilitating staff to have time of to volunteer in other organisations if they want to.
What therapeutic services do you provide?
Counselling service for women, women’s emotional wellbeing groups, perinatal support group. Our children and young people’s service (STAR Centre) run a full programme of psychological interventions for both children and their families.
Give examples of three things that your organisation is proud of please attach pictures and quotes to support your work?
Our womens well being group – this informal session has been part of Venus for over 10 years, this session is ran by the women who attend to facilitate positive friendships and connections, and to combat loneliness.
Annual residential – this yearly activity sees us take over 100 Sefton residents to the peak district to enjoy activities they would not normally take part in, this provides valuable family time in a different environment, and the opportunity to try lots of activities such as bouldering, hill walking, water sports. Staff wellbeing – this helps us ensure our staff and volunteers are in the best place to actively encourage others to prioritise their own wellbeing.
Find out more about Venus:
Website: venuscharity.org
Email: carlie.machell@venuscharity.org
Telephone: 01514744744
Drop in
Is there anything else you would like us to share with people?
We are always in need of donations to run programmes and services, should you wish to make a donation please contact: louise.boynton@venuscharity.org