Introduction
Lilyannes Charity supporting Hartlepool people providing life-changing support right here and right now when it comes to Housing, Mental Health & Loneliness - rebranded to Lilyannes Wellbeing and integrated physical activity across their services to achieve their wider social outcomes.
What happened?
LilyAnne’s is a social enterprise coffee shop that uses sales generated to deliver person-centred support to engage with those who have completely disengaged from their communities and become isolated and overwhelmed with feelings of emotional well-being. They offer a one-to-one support approach, peer to peer support and work to the points of a mental health trigger, which could be housing, budgeting, relationship advice or trauma. Through the development of a trusting partnership that was nutured over many months, Lilyanne's understood how physical activity could be used to support the people they work with. With the support from a TIF bid, they formed a weekly walking group that was held from their cafe after their support group meetings. The staff at Lilyanne's become walk leader trained to start off the project which quickly evolved into the recruitment of volunteers within their cafe to become walk leader trained and lead the walks themselves acting as great role models. From their involvement in the walking group they were key partners in setting up the creating of the walk into wellness steering group - a collobration of partners across the town to work collectively providing walking provision for all levels of particpants.
Through the relationships established through walk into wellness, Lilyanne's became a key partner in a PCN project, the first in its kind of setting up a cafe developing a relationship directly with the GP surgery. They are identifing people who are contacting services and making appointments simply because they are lonely, whereby the GPs, nurses prescribers and mental health nurses within the surgery who can refer people to Lilyanne's with a coffee card, which is treated as a transaction and signals to the staff that the person has come for some extra support. Lilyanne's were successful in securing a National Lottery funded of £45K over two years to fund this work and develop this relationship further with local GP surgeries. It has enabled the employment of a new role of first steps neighbourhood and engagement worker to focus on the development of this work further within both the colleges, local schools and GP surgeries. Throughout all this work, Lilyanne's rebranded as Lilyanne's Well-Being and recognised the need to integrate physical activity throughout their core service.
Who was involved?
Lilyanne's, PCNs, LA, Big lottery, TVS
When?
Weekly walking groups.
Rebranding of Lilyanne's.
Employment of community engagement officers.
Where?
This took place in the cafe within Hartlepool.
It also took place within GP surgeries and in peoples own homes with the social isolation visits.
The rebrand is across all websites, social media platforms and promotional materials and demonstrates to other VCS organisations that impact of physical activity on wider social outcomes.
How?
Partners got involved via TVS proactively contacting them and spending vital time nurturing relationships over a extensive amount of time.
So?
This changed the charities system, how they operate, how they allocate resource and how they develop services.
Through the services they provide they change peoples lives and ultimatley gets very hard to reach groups being physically active.
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