Mental Health Awareness Week 2024
For Mental Health Awareness Week this year, Response decided to dedicate the whole week to acknowledging and promoting wellbeing at work. Our staff work tirelessly to support and improve the wellbeing of the people we support in our services, as we understand the impact this can have on their mental health. However, we also recognise that staff might sometimes forget to look out for their own wellbeing.
Response's Wellbeing and Connection Group worked together to create a week filled with events, resources, and spaces, for staff to come together and make time for their own wellbeing. We tried to provide a variety of flexible options as we know that for some of us, taking time out of our busy schedules, can cause more stress.
During Wellbeing Week, we successfully ran one online and one face to face event per day. We also provided each project/office with a wellbeing box. The box included a team guide for the week, including: a schedule of events, and alternative activities for teams to enjoy if they were unable to attend any of our online or face to face events. Plus, we made sure that staff had everything they needed to be able to do these activities (e.g. sports equipment, craft materials, plant growing kits...) and really take time to connect and refresh!
If after all of this, wellbeing week really wasn't something that staff could engage with, we topped off the wellbeing box with simple treats that encouraged us to pause, and take at least ONE moment for ourselves.
The theme for 2024's Mental Health Awareness Week was movement. We tried to facilitate activities that would inspire staff to move, either whilst sat at their desk, or outside and away from their screens!
Our online events included: Spanish for beginners, guided visualisation, chair yoga, online games, and virtual pub style quiz.
Our face to face events consisted of: A friendly football match, a creative session run by our youth workers, an exotic animal meet and greet, and two beginners salsa sessions!
We also supported staff to take part in a number of colleague wellbeing challenges. We provided a sunflower growing starter kit and an accompanying measurement chart. Staff have already started growing their sunflowers and we look forward to seeing how they much they grow over the summer months! We also provided a step tracker chart and challenged staff to document how many steps they were making during the week, encouraging them where possible to get out and move for their wellbeing! Finally, in their wellbeing boxes, staff would find a collection of pebbles and paints. We wanted to see how far we could get these pebbles to travel! We asked staff to write our social media tag on the back of their pebble (@responseorganisation) and get creative with designing the front! The pebbles are then to be placed somewhere out in the world, away from work, where the public might find them. So far, our pebbles have travelled to both Dorset and London! Keep an eye on our social media and see where our pebbles end up!
