This Mental Health Awareness Week, we’re focusing on the power of Taking Action. Because while raising awareness matters, real change happens when people come together to take action for each other’s mental health and wellbeing, whether that’s by supporting local projects through donations or delivering vital work in the community.
What can happen when communities take action for mental health? What happens when we bring mental health support to the margins? As part of this, we caught up Pippa at Street Talk, an Islington Giving funded project, to explore these questions.
What can happen when communities take action for mental health?
“I loved this question because it took me back to my motivation for setting up Street Talk which takes psychotherapy into hostels and day centres for vulnerable women.
At that time I was an NHS psychotherapist based in a hospital and became mindful that the people who most needed therapy, vulnerable people, on the margins never made it into the therapy room.
They were excluded whether consciously or unconsciously by the service. I was unhappy about that and in a spirit of experimentation, I started taking therapy into a day centre for women in street prostitution in East London.
I set out to learn from the women how to provide a therapy service which overcomes the barriers to access which serve to exclude the most vulnerable. Working with the women a model of therapy developed which I called Therapy of Presence which works for the women. Twenty odd years later a “community of practice” has been founded upon that model.
The community includes the 15 team members at Street Talk, as well as colleagues in the sector who have taken the model, or aspects of the model and brought that to their work with vulnerable people.”
Street Talk is one of our local partners working alongside Islington residents to improve mental health, reduce isolation, and strengthen community connection. They provide counselling for women who are often excluded from traditional services due to complex and overlapping needs, including homelessness, lack of access to public funds, no GP registration, or living in fear and hiding.
Read how our latest grant to Street Talk is helping bring therapy to women most in need:
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