Archive for the ‘Foundation’ Category

Two years ago, we closed down the Anxiety Leeds meetings. We’ve missed them, and despite the meetings ceasing we have still seen a lot of people accessing our website and looking for support. As a result, we have decided to expand the website to offer additional support.

This includes a wider range of sign-posting to different organisations to help people get the best support for them.

It also includes a new series of videos offering practical tips on managing anxiety. These can be found on our new homepage.

Anxiety Leeds is closing. Since 2013, we’ve had thousands of people attend our support groups at the Leeds General Infirmary, supporting each other practically and emotionally. We hope that everyone who has come through our doors found some support from doing so.

Since the pandemic, we have been unable to hold face-to-face meetings. With myself and Chris having to step away from the organisation for personal reasons, we now do not have a venue, facilitators, or capacity to train new volunteers, and therefore it makes sense to close the group and allow others to take our place.

In terms of where you should go for support:

If you would like to access resources yourself and find out more about what is available in Leeds, MindWell remains the best place to visit.

In addition, you can access support at Linking Leeds. They provide Wellbeing Coordinators who can review your situation and help you access the most appropriate support.

I would like to extend a personal thank you to everyone who has attended, volunteered with, fundraised for, or otherwise been involved in Anxiety Leeds over the past nine years.

The Humanist Chaplaincy network has relaunched its digital platform and, for the first time, has brought its training course into digital as well. The new Humanist Chaplaincy Level 1 provides an introduction to the foundations of philosophy, theory and practice as a non-religious chaplain. Find out more on their website.

Anxiety Leeds has been running face-to-face groups since 2013. However, as we are based at the hospital, our meetings have been suspended since the pandemic arrived to ensure we keep both our clients and vulnerable hospital patients safe (from COVID, not from mental health problems, unfortunately).

So far, we have been referring people to other organisations who are better equipped to handle digital events and services. However, due to high demand, we are now trialling on an online community that allows attendees of Anxiety Leeds to interact digitally, hopefully providing the same level of warmth and support we were able to achieve in the group.

Today, we’re launching the first Anxiety Leeds impact report.

We regularly take feedback from our group members and survey them to see what is working and what is not. However, this is the first time we have systematically reviewed the results and published a report about it.

Here are the headline figures:

• We support a wide range of ages across both genders
• We support a broad range of anxiety conditions, often compounded by depression and physical health issues
• 71% feel less alone after attending our meetings
• 29% feel a lot more positive about life
• 40% even see a reduction in day-to-day anxiety, despite us not being a treatment group

This is set on a background of us working with people who have anxiety, and therefore have a negative outlook on the world, compounded by also suffering from depression, which is the case of 62% of our members.

Here is the headline graph:

It is clear that not everyone sees a benefit in attending our group. This is consistent with other mental health programmes, all of which typically experience high drop-out rates.

The majority of people who do attend do see a benefit. This benefit increases the more they attend. This result should be viewed with caution: although it is highly plausible that there is a causative effect here, it is not direct evidence of one.

We’re also delivering an internal plan to group members on how we can continue to improve the group as we go forward.

You can download the full report here.

The Anxiety Leeds website has had a small makeover. We have been running the WordPress Twenty Eleven theme since we started in 2013. It has been good to us, and the newer themes have never really looked as good.

However, it did take up a huge amount of space, especially on mobile devices. Therefore, I have put together a custom design, based on the popular Sela theme. It functions well on both desktop and mobile. We have also been busy improving the content and making pages easier to find.

I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who helped out with the Humanist Action Group‘s 2016 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters.

Once again it was a heroic effort from Sarann, charity coordinator at West Yorkshire Humanists, who organised the entire event. We also want thank Jo James for allowing us to use Mill Hill Chapel, and all the volunteers who donated items and turned up at the final boxing to help us package and deliver everything.

Here are some of my favourite photos from the event:

Over at Anxiety Leeds we have some brand new promo material for the group. Not only do we have some updated flyers but we also have some brand new glossy A3 posters as well. If anyone wants some for their work, school, community centre, etc, get in touch and I can have some sent!

Last month Sarann organised a food drive. It was great to see the various Humanist groups around Leeds including West Yorkshire Humanists and Sunday Assembly Leeds all coming together to help the homeless. As ever, Sarann did an excellent job organising everything!

A huge thank you to everyone who helped out with this year’s Humanist Action Group 2015 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters in Leeds. In particular well done to Sarann who took the lead this year in organising everything, and did an amazing job!

We did not inventorise everything this year, so we do not have a grand total for how much we raised. However we did make deliveries to three different shelters in Leeds, a food bank charity named Fair Share and contributed to the Vegan Feast, a monthly hot meal for homeless people in Leeds. This totals to five separate organisations who received a delivery from us.

Thank you to Mill Hill Chapel who kindly provided free use of their building to us. Here are some of my favourite photos from the event.