Mental health charities’ Big Conversation with the people we support ends
Richmond Fellowship has finished its ‘Big Conversation’ with the people who use its services as part of plans to give individuals greater opportunity to get more actively involved in the organisation.
The national mental health charity and its partners wanted to find out from people what they think about creating opportunities for them to get more actively involved at all levels of the organisations, including:
- Their own support plan
- How services are run
- How the organisations are run
- Championing mental health issues and challenging stigma in society.
So it staged a six week ‘Big Conversation’ offering a range of ways for people give their views from taking part in a local focus group to filling in our online questionnaire.
Director of performance, quality and innovation Grazina Berry said: “We’d like to say a big ‘thank you’ to everyone who supported our ‘Big Conversation’. We received lots of fantastic feedback and we’re going through all of the responses to understand what’s important to the people we support.”
The newly formed group of Richmond Fellowship, 2Care, CAN, Croftlands Trust and My Time, is working together on a joint strategy to truly put the people supported by these organisations at the heart of what they do. We’re looking at what ideas and suggestions we can feasibly integrate from our ‘Big Conversation’ into the development of our new joint strategy.
One of the group’s key commitments is to build relationships with the people who use their services where staff and people who use services work together as equal partners to design, plan and provide support together. This is called co-production.
Everyone has valuable skills, knowledge, experience and resources that could be harnessed to improve the quality of life for individuals and communities. That means the people who use Richmond Fellowship’s services as well as staff and volunteers.
Watch this space for more news on this.
