I was listening to a podcast interview this week and, forgive me for not remembering the title, I was struck by the terminology the interview used when talking about hard to reach communities. She described them as under-served and that resonated with me. Too often we seem to get our language the wrong way around […]
This week, an eight-year-old blog post from Oxfam about ‘Positive Deviance’ came to my attention about reversing a common approach to public health programmes (based on the Ladder of Intervention) and instead, changing people’s practice first, and then working backwards to the education and knowledge. The Ladder of Intervention assumes that we start from the […]
Interesting article in The Guardian today around fighting loneliness and the effects of the loss of human contact and touch as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. As humans we seek touch as a form of communication or reassurance; as an interaction between members of a community as much as between strangers, or even […]
Working with a mental health charity in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t make me an expert on mental health – but it does provide me with a platform to report what I’ve seen and to try and prepare for the COVID-19 mental health crisis to come. The pandemic has been traumatic for everyone, […]
Although the coronavirus lockdown is having a negative effect on people’s mental health as discussed in our article on the COVID-19 Mental Health Crisis, there are plenty of examples of positive activities that we should also turn our attention too including personal creative projects such as Jamie Harmon’s efforts to find community in lockdown. It’s […]
Community Innovation comes from necessity. Creating community is big on our minds at the moment – Community is what’s needed to support the vulnerable, community is what’s needed to pull us all together while staying apart. Community ideas are flying around and funders are frantically trying to filter the effective from the less so. At […]