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Will & Esther continue to share about LOSS

Seasons for Growth

RL: You started to list the things you provide and we got as far as mentoring.
Will: Yes, we also offer a programme called ‘Seasons for Growth’ which is a ‘grief and loss education’ programme.  Overall it is eleven weeks but the first eight weeks are working with a group of up to eight young people and this is very much split into age groups, and we start at 6 and finish at 18. It teaches young people about loss following the analogy of seasons, that there is change.

In Autumn things change for the worse, in Winter things get bitter, in Spring there are new life signs, and in Summer there is hope.  It fits within a school curriculum in that it hits the ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda. Each week is a 40 minute session and there are two weeks for every season. We have a celebration session at the end where we look back and we invite in parents or carers so that they can see what their young people have done, and then we have two ‘reconnector’ sessions with that same group in the following term.

RL: So where do you do this?
Will: We are doing it in the community and we’re offering it in schools. It helps young people in that you can mix bereavement and family separation all in together. It’s not a process of counselling or therapy, although there are therapeutic elements in it; it’s more an education programme. It’s certainly not counselling but it teaches young people that their grief is normal, and that their emotions are normal, and it also educates them in ways that they can express it healthily.  It also provides them with a peer group so that young people know that they are not alone – and that is so important.  Often young people feel very isolated and feel no one can ever understand what I am going through.  Putting them together really helps them understand that they aren’t alone in it, and they can often be surprised that others are going through the same things that they are going through.

Heart Work

RL: Very good. Other things?
Will:  Something else we do is “Heart Work”, which is a partnership programme that we are involved in with ‘Stepping Stones Bereavement Services’ in Southend. Every two months there is a programme for six to eleven year olds which provides an arts-crafts space specifically for bringing bereaved and pre-bereaved children together but over longer periods. Pre-bereaved children are those who have parents or siblings who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. It helps them all adjust and understand and gives them space to express what is going on in them. In the future, out of that, we are looking at a teens group doing the same kind of thing, again a partnership in Southend, for bereaved or pre-bereaved, and we are looking at doing residential trips for them as well.  

Training

RL: It sounds like you have a lot on your plate?   
Will:  Yes, but we also do Dialogue training at well.   Last term we did three days of training: one was for Mentoring, one was for Introduction to Grief and Loss, and one was Advanced Listening Skills, and we’ve had a whole variety of people come along to them. We’ve had whole group of YMCA workers from Chelmsford, we’ve had parents, paid youth workers, voluntary youth workers and also people who don’t do any of those but are just interested in increasing their skills or in knowing about those sorts of things. We are looking to develop those courses, to have more, and particularly we’re looking to do more things for parents, to help parents understand the kind of emotions that young people are going through.   In the future we are also looking at developing the mentoring even more and also addressing low esteem in young women, which Esther is very passionate about. Then we’ve got various other projects in mind that are on the back burner for the moment but which we hope to bring forward in the days to come. Ideally in the future we would hope that we may work as an integral part of one or more schools because the need is there and we are eager to address it.

Fundraising and the Future

RL: OK Will, thank you for that. Esther, what is your role in all this?
Esther:  I’m our administrator, in the background handling all of the administration, dealing with our finances and our fundraising.  We did some fundraising events last year that were very successful and have been putting in bids for funding. We did well last year but need more in the days ahead, just to be able to continue doing what we have started doing. That’s my main focus at the present.  I’m also going to be training, along with another lady who is volunteering to work with us, to become a mentor as well, so that we can offer girls mentoring also. We’ve had a couple of parents come to us whose girls are struggling with low self-esteem and could do with support, so we are trying to respond to that by having two of us women trained up for mentoring as well.

RL: Will, listening to you just now, and as Esther has just mentioned, there has been and is coming quite a lot of training going into this?
Will: Yes, I have been a paid youth work for quite a large number of years and a volunteer youth worker for some time before that so I’ve always worked with children and young people. I am now a qualified mentor and I have level  2 counselling training, but I am not a counsellor – my belief is that most children don’t need counselling – but I’ve done the training to give me the background understanding, but how I apply it is very different to a counsellor. I’ve done all the training on bereavement at Havens Hospice and have done volunteering with Little Havens, working with the siblings of the children that use them, or with children whose parents have been in there. I’ve also done the Group Facilitator Course done through Child Bereavement UK, which gives you the skill set for working with groups of young people. I’m looking at the next level of training for myself now but Mentoring is my main thrust with what I do as well as group work with young people.

RL: Esther, you were indicating you would like to develop more of your own hands on stuff?
Esther:  Yes, I have had quite a lot of experience with children and young people, and I have trained as a teacher but decided against using it in schools.   I have done quite a lot of community based work and was working for Extended Schools for a period of time and within that I ran an arts and crafts after-school club.  What my long term goal is, is to become a creative therapist, but at the moment we are too busy to progress that. Our priority, as we said just now, is for one of us and at least one other, to get trained as mentors for working with girls because that is where the need is. I’d also like to develop the fund-raising side of things. It’s a very competitive world and culture out there today in the current climate, trying to raise funds.

RL: Do you have others with expertise behind you to support and encourage you?
Esther: On the one side we very much work with partnerships, such as Stepping Stones Bereavement, and alongside the Megacentre in Rayleigh, as well as in Hawkwell Baptist Church who are very strong on community work.
Will: We also have a strong team of trustees with different backgrounds, but all skilled in different facets of what we are doing. We would like to expand that group to include someone with more of a business head, but they have been excellent at shaping us, questioning us and challenging us and they have been invaluable.

RL: As you mentioned it just now, Esther, have you got fund raising plans in the immediate future?      
Esther: We have a Charity Quiz Night in the Great Eastern Room of the Freight House on Friday 8th March and we have another event on 26th April that we are finalising.  

RL: Well thank you both very much for your time and for sharing so comprehensively. All it leaves me to do is wish you well for the future.

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