Breathing Space News

 

• Great news! Breathing Space programme to go full steam ahead after successful bid for government funding. Futurebuilders UK (the government-backed investment agency) has awarded us around £300,000 to build and grow our exciting Breathing Space programme for health and wellbeing. Around £25,000 is a grant and the rest is a loan. This means that Breathing Space will definitely be going ahead, with building work scheduled to start in September. This will create a beautiful new venue for our courses in meditation and mindfulness techniques that help people who have struggled with depression, addiction, stress and chronic pain to look after their own mental health. It also gives us the opportunity of making the LBC much more flexible – so we can teach the Dharma to more people and attract a new and more diverse range of people to the centre.

• Breathing Space gets full-time Manager. The Breathing Space programme has recruited a new full-time Manager – Tim Segaller. Tim previously worked for the Royal National Institute of the Blind in their Policy and Campaigns department, and has also worked in communications, PR and marketing in the charitable sector. We hope that having a full-time Manager in place will give us extra momentum towards our long-term goal of becoming a centre of excellence in East London for giving people the tools to manage their own health.

• We have had an overwhelmingly good response to our call for people to take up free places on our Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy courses - after an article about this appeared in ‘East End Life’ on 16 April. These free places came about thanks to a new £9,757 contract with the London Borough of Tower Hamlets (Adult Services). This grant is to help us find ways of ‘informing residents of Tower Hamlets about non-medical alternatives to dealing with depression and giving them access to these alternatives’.

• Retreats for carers in Waltham Forest. We have agreed with Waltham Forest Carers Association (WFCA) to run two retreats in the next year – at our retreat centre in Suffolk - for some of the carers they support. This follows on from the outreach project we have run at WFCA. We are looking forward to building this relationship in the coming months.

• We are in discussion with the Island Health GP Practice on the Isle of Dogs about running an outreach project in their surgery. We hope to deliver a Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) course later in the year in to patients at that surgery who have suffered from depression.

• Meetings with Community Development and local PCT. The Breathing Space Team met with Abbas Mirza, Head of Community Development at Tower Hamlets PCT, to explore ways of working together. We also met the Senior Management Team of Tower Hamlets NHS PCT Community & Primary Care Psychology & Counselling Service.

• Film about depression with BBC. BBC London has teamed up with CSV (Community Service Volunteers) in a number of East London boroughs to help local groups communicate their work. We have made a 3 minute film called ‘Down no More’. You can see it on the BBC website.

• Academic research. An academic research team (headed by Dr Damien Ridge, CAM Reader, University of Westminster) has applied for funding to research ‘Men’s health and meditation’. Key areas include: how does Mindfulness-Based Therapy impact on narratives of recovery from illness, staying well and help-seeking?

• Press coverage - Mental Health Practice. A journal for mental health nurses and others in the mental health field has published an article in the March 2007 edition on the work of Maitreyabandhu and the creation of the Breathing Space programme.

• Press coverage - Nursing Standard. Nursing Standard has commissioned a feature on Maitreyabandhu and the Breathing Space Project. To be published later this year.

• Meeting Azom Mortuza, Community Development Worker (mental health). The Breathing Space team is organizing a meeting with Azom Mortuza to discuss Breathing Space’s work with special reference to the Muslim community and how they might access our services.

• Visit to the Bromley by Bow Centre. Dr Paramabandhu Groves and the Breathing Space Director met with Dave Boice, Adult Services Development Manager of the Bromley by Bow Centre - to look around the centre and discuss joint working.

• New Breathing Space website. The Breathing Space team met with David Green and Chris Collacott (March 07) to review our website and to plan a new site. David is an expert in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and is Global eMarketing Director for Deloitte. They are offering volunteer consultancy to help us to build a new Breathing Space site.

• East London Business Alliance (ELBA) – a regeneration agency that encourages business involvement in the social and economic regeneration of East London. We will be meeting ELBA's Health and Communications Director - who has wide experience of partnership working with the NHS - to look at ways Breathing Space could build links with the local health community and to identify possible sources of funding.

• Outreach work for the homeless. We have been meeting with Kelvin Barton, the Mental Health Services Co-ordinator of Providence Row Housing Association, about a joint project involving Providence Row and Crisis Skylight. We plan to create an outreach Stress Clinic for homeless people. This is part of a larger vision of outreach work for the homeless.