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Ecominds: Feel better outside, feel better inside
Posted Monday 24 October 2011
What do the South Bank Centre, a front garden in Fleet, and a hidden corner of Regent’s Park have in common? They’re just three of 130 projects run by groups funded by Mind through our Ecominds programme that are using green spaces to help improve mental health.
I’ve been lucky enough to visit all three projects, and together with the CEO of Veolia, Jean Dominique (Mind is Veolia’s Charity of the year) I recently visited a fourth in Mile End.
The evidence is clear: spending time in the outdoors where there’s some greenery is good for your mental health. It’s pretty obvious really; a brief walk in the park, a long stride in the countryside, gardening at home: they all have beneficial effects.
But I found more than that in these Ecominds projects. I found a commitment to humanity as well as nature, and a quiet but determined faith in the benefits of ‘ecotherapy’ as it’s often known.
The Queen Elizabeth Hall rooftop garden on London’s South Bank is a good example. Set among a sea of concrete, this island of greenery is visually stunning, yet retains a calmness for all who visit.
Ecominds funds Providence Row Housing Association, who work with some of the most vulnerable people in our society, through its Grounded Ecotherapy project. The project helps people like Paul Pulford, who helps to maintain the roof garden. He used to be homeless, had drug and mental health problems, and he told me, thanks to Ecominds funding (which pays for his salary), he’s just paid his own rent for the first time in 20 years.
The other projects I’ve visited have remarkably similar ingredients: committed staff, highly engaged people using the service, passion for the outdoors and green exercise, and a resilience-building calmness.
In Fleet, Minding the Garden, helps to maintain the gardens of the elderly and disabled. At first it was designed for people with mental health problems to do the gardening, but it soon became clear that the project has a beneficial effect on those older people who are housebound and have little contact with others.
In Regent’s Park, a BTCV-run green gym brings people with and without experience of mental health problems to create a natural wilderness in a hidden corner of a busy park in central London, which can become a home for birds, stag beetles and wild flowers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYmQvEZFx_8
The Ecominds programme is now in full swing. Thanks to the Big Lottery Fund and the organisations we’ve been able to fund, this simple yet powerful idea is becoming embedded across the country. Our new ‘Feel better inside, feel better inside’ poster campaign marks the start of the next stage: to make it grow so that anyone who could benefit from green exercise has easy access to it.
But as any gardener will tell you, you need time, plenty of patience and careful nurturing to ensure it grows well.
Paul Farmer, Chief Executive
8 Comments
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I like a walk in a garden, but I guess my nagging concern is that horticulture and catering have been promoted to death as therapeutic for us, or as a route into employment [very happy for the person referenced here but in reality how many get jobs].
It worries me that some of the 'clearing up' and 'maintenance' work of older/disabled people's gardens currently undertaken by youth offenders could be passed onto mental health service users on Workfare.
In one of the few day hospitals left in one area they get their service users outside clearing up litter as a 'therapy'.
So long as these activities remain a choice, great, and if they are therapeutic to people even better, but can we also develop activities beyond horticulture and catering.
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I used to attend a similar and brilliant project but it is now struggling due to lack of funding and the Personal Budgetts
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Hi Mindreader, you’re right to be concerned, but the diversity of projects - and the activities they offer - is one of Ecominds’ strengths. No two projects are the same. Horticulture is a common theme, but there are plenty of other activities on offer – from dry stone walling in the Pennines to a surf school for young people in Cornwall, and a national network of Green Gyms provided by BTCV: http://www2.btcv.org.uk/display/wellbeing
Ecominds is proving to really successful in lifting volunteers’ self-esteem and providing supportive spaces where people with mental health problems can find routes back into work if they choose. Don’t take my word for it, read Simon’s blog on his journey from volunteer to employee, which will be posted here later this week.
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While the weather holds, I find it therapeutic to take my camera and do my best to capture the natural scene. Here is where I visited, September a year ago. I hope you can enjoy this scenery...
http://www.slideshare.net/Rambuie/seeking-assynt-slides-abridged-7311695#
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I'm sorry Ken but most volunteers I know do not find their way into employment so the volunteer to employee stories ring hollow for me. They are the exception rather than the rule. Support from care teams relies upon even being to access care teams these days and declared voluntary work will get a person in receipt of benefits declared fit for work irrespective of whether they are ready for it. Some of the decent employment support workers attached to care teams [time limited & only if you're contact with a care team] do the kind of support which Jobcentres and back-to-work schemes wouldn't do and even they say that most people they are able to help get back into work it's typically catering/domestic/shelf filling low paid and not co-ordinator posts and certainly not posts where a person would be earning enough to not need housing benefit. People would be wise to remember that working tax credit isn't availableto people working 16 hours unless you're a lone parent, have a dependent or are on some level of DLA [something people will be losing when it changes to PIP]. I'm not being a damp squid here, I'm just being realistic. The rock bottom to employed stories are all very well but don't necessarily reflect wider reality.
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yes Tess, Personal Budgets are a problem:
http://notsobigsociety.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/personalisation-personal-budgets-and-demos/ -
I wouldn’t want readers to get the impression that Ecominds projects are solely about getting people with mental health problems back into the workplace - but it’s great that this is happening in some cases. The emphasis is on people using outdoor space and enjoying the positive side-effects of exercise – and they don’t necessarily have to do this at an Ecominds project either. Finding your own breathing space - be it at the local park or out in the countryside - can be a great way to lift mood and reduce stress.
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Voluntary work does NOT lead to paid work-I should know I've been volunteering for six years and no nearer getting a job as I was then. I swallowed the old lie of leading to paid work, something to occupy your time, doing good etc etc. Funny how other people manage to 'occupy their time' in paid careers without doing a scrap of unpaid labour. Where I work at the CAB it has become so pressured with the threat of closure it feels just like a paid job without the salary. I feel so angry wrting letters to dozens of nursing homes, supermarkets etc etc getting no reply then finding out through the grapevine that someone has got a job there through word of mouth!
70% of employers dont want us and it makes not a scrap of difference if we do years of voluntary work, thats where they want us a reserve army of unpaid labour. At the same time we are 'benefit scroungers' that need clamping down on, charming eh? Why do we always accept second best? It seems that everyone else has rights except us
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