Tag: wellbeing

Birmingham Online Directory for Vulnerable Communities Launched

Posted on by Terry Rigby

Introducing BARMS

The Birmingham Asylum Refugee and Migrant Support directory (BARMS) provides links to support for some of our most vulnerable communities.

BARMS is an online directory of organisations, services and groups that are committed to welcoming, supporting and resettling asylum seekers, refugees and migrants in Birmingham.

Birmingham City Council has worked in partnership with Common Unity, who are the developers of Urbrum and The Waiting Room,  to develop the website.

The directory is a direct response to meeting the needs and wishes of our partners in the Birmingham Migration Forum.

A diverse city

Birmingham is a friendly, cosmopolitan city which is proud of the warm welcome it extends to people from all corners of the globe, regardless of their situation.

Councillor John Cotton, Cabinet Member for Social Inclusion, Community Safety & Equalities at Birmingham City Council, said: “This is a fantastic resource which shows the wealth of support available from organisations who are working together to help asylum seekers, refugees and migrants arriving in our city.

The thinking behind BARMS

BARMS is a one stop directory to access information and services specific to migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

It facilitates communication between organisations and supports better collaboration and partnership working.

BARMS also underpins the council’s commitment to Birmingham being a City of Sanctuary and reflects the emerging Resettlement and Integration Strategy for the city. You can find out more by visiting  http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/cos.

Get involved

If you want your organisation listed on the BARMS website there is a PDF form available to submit. LINK TO ADD A SERVICE

Working in partnership

  • The content on this website will also automatically appear on the public facing “The Waiting Room”, which is a citywide directory of services for all communities in the city.
  • The Waiting Room also provides a useful free text search function which can help people find things according to key words or a service for instance. So please make sure you reference terms like “asylum seeker”, “refugee”, “migrant”, “immigration”, as well as the place or postcode you deliver from in the description of what you do.

Sean Russell Director of West Midlands Mental Health Commission

Posted on by Terry Rigby

Sean Russell Director of West Midlands Mental Health Commission. #MyRecovery

What does recovery mean to you?

Many people will experience poor mental health at some point in their life.

For some people this will last only a short time, others may live with poor mental health their whole life.

Regardless of its length or severity gaining ‘recovery’ from poor mental health is important to the person themselves and their family and friends.

Recovery will mean different things to different people.

Some people might experience recovery as a sense of feeling more positive and enjoying things that they had stopped getting pleasure from. For another person recovery might mean getting back to work while for someone else it might be about becoming more independent, getting out of the house more or giving something back to their local community.

Seeking support

The NHS, Birmingham City Council and many community and charitable organisations in Birmingham offer help and support to people who experience poor mental health.

Working together we want to make sure that people don’t just ‘survive’ mental illness but thrive, getting the most out of life. We want to make sure that all services put helping people recover at the heart of what they do.

Understanding what recovery means to people will help us change the way that we support people and families to do this.

More information

You can find out more about recovery and support services by visiting The Waiting Room

Connecting Community Networks

Posted on by Terry Rigby

What is CCN all about?

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Life can be hard…but for some, because of particular circumstances, and more often than not, through no fault of their own, life can be much harder still. Connecting Community Networks recognises this and looks to protect and enhance citizen well-being and promote life quality. It oversees the delivery of a number of much needed holistic services that has real, evidenced based wellbeing benefits for some of our most vulnerable members in the community. CCN takes a different approach from many other traditional services by starting from a premise of vulnerability and risk due to life challenges and looking to demonstrate a positive resolution for the individual based on improved wellbeing.

The Organisations Behind CCN

Common Unity is the central driving force behind all of the CCN programmes with external expertise being brought into the process to best deliver all elements of each and every programme. This partnership arrangement means that from conceptualisation right through to the point of evaluation, specialist support is realised to demonstrate the potential for such approaches to improving well-being.

 What Programmes Are in Place?

  • Urbrum – web based community centred platform, is all about discovering innovative ways of engaging communities with their own health and wellbeing and the health and well-being of those around them. Its approach to engagement, information and intelligence sees communities as both the recipients and providers of health and well-being intelligence with a view that through such an organic process, services and support will continue to best reflect what communities need and want.
  • Tailored Suicide Prevention Training – Delivery of the highly respected one day suicide prevention programme known as SCHEMA.  This training is delivered across Birmingham and Solihull to best identify and support those who are vulnerable in respect of suicidal ideation and behaviour.
  • ManMade Communities – Utilising the ManMade Peer Led support approach that enables men to survive in modern day society.
  • ManMade Cruse – Men often find it difficult to engage regarding their losses in life and thus can play a negative part in men coping with crisis through loss. This programme looks to achieve greater resilience and well-being through providing men with the opportunity to engage with the area of loss and bereavement as part of a Peer Led Support Programme led by specialists in the field of Bereavement.
  • The Waiting Room – Now developed as an App, this online directory of services and support opportunities for Birmingham and Solihull residents is recognised as the go to place to find the right service for you.

Want to know more?

For more information contact the developers of CCN at Common Unity

ManMade

Posted on by Terry Rigby

Because there’s no strength in silence

manmade

Man Made is a forward-thinking programme that supports men between the ages of 20 and 60 to realise their full potential – a tailored 8-week programme providing participants with the skills and knowledge to support their own health and well-being. 

Despite the general public perception, the suicide rate of men in mid-life has been comparable to younger men. In the last eight years though suicides in younger men have reduced whilst for men in their mid-years there has been an increase. But this is not just a challenge of age – when it comes to suicide there are a range of associated inter-related factors that can bring an individual to feel in such a state of despair that they literally believe they would be better off dead.

Associated factors for men, and women, include social inequality, deprivation, health inequalities and financial inequality as well as, in the case of many men particularly, an underlying ongoing challenge of male identity – this is where we need to consider what characteristics are deemed important when a man compares himself to his peers and how can we tackle those characteristics which prevent men from seeking help?

With the recession having hit hard across the UK and no less hard in the West Midlands in the last few years, the effect of unemployment experienced by many men twinned with a range of other associated factors that often follow on, means that despair for many individuals in this situation can result, in the most tragic of cases, in death by suicide.

The ManMade Dudley Programme was established in February 2015 as a pilot programme that engages unemployed men from the area to best support them emotionally and practically in taking best care of their own mental health and well-being. This evaluation looks to cover all the aspects of ManMade, both its successes and challenges, in the hope that firstly, the learning from the programme can be cascaded to best realise a greater understanding of the complexities of men as well as secondly, providing a knowledge platform where this programme or future off-shot programmes be developed further for the benefit of the wider cohort.

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