In our local community
We’ve done some interesting stuff within our local community…
EmpowerHER
We are very proud to be the "Best Project Design 2020" for the EmpowHER program as a delivery partner for UK Youth & the British Red Cross.
EmpowHER aims to build young women and girls’ self-esteem and wellbeing by providing inclusive and meaningful social action opportunities to inspire them to lead change in their communities.
It will ensure young women and girls who are most at risk of low well-being will have the opportunity to access and engage in meaningful social action through opportunities with the British Red Cross and the wider community.
Over a 12-week period, we have supported a group of girls and young women from our community to learn about looking their own mental health and self-esteem by working together and developing a social action project. They have designed and fundraised to build a memorial garden in Ipswich, UK for those who lost their lives to COVID19. They are now in the final stages of securing land for this to move forward.
Over Christmas in 2020, the team was at it again, this time making PomPoms, to create memory trees! Creating a social action project that the new team of girls could join and take part in from the comfort of their own homes seemed like the perfect way to get the girls engaged from day one, by showing them what social action is. The final memory trees were gifted to charities and residential homes to display across Suffolk.
UPDATE September 2022
We were recently featured on our local news site, the Ipswich Star, talking about our newly completed project the COVID memorial garden.
Our organisation was approached by the charity UK Youth in 2020 about delivering a series of projects aimed at girls and young women. After all the challenges of lockdown and COVID, including having to meet as a group over Zoom, which many of the girls found difficult. And the difficulty of finding land, a plot of land was finally secured for the project as part of the Oaks Meadow Project, an environmental community area with plans for a sensory garden, wildlife areas and vegetable patches. You can read about this project here.
Now 2 years down the line the Covid memorial garden is complete and ready for visitors and can be found at Oaks Meadows in Combs and Little Finborough, in Mid Suffolk as part of the Oaks Meadows project.
Michelle and Kristie who ran the project and worked with the girls on this project said:
“Kristie and I are hugely proud of how far the girls have come. Now, two years down the line, we’ve completed the garden. It’s brought a sense of closure and pride that, despite the doors we had to bang on, we didn’t give up. We made it happen. I was really proud to share the message with our girls, if you never give up and you keep trying, good things do happen. It’s not the end – it's actually the very beginning, because there are young plants and trees which have just been put in, so it will mature year after year and get more beautiful.” - Michelle
If you would like to donate a plant in memory of someone to go into the COVID memorial garden, please email us at info@autismandadhd.org.
Please click here to read the full article from the Ipswich star.
Online music festivals
During COVID, we were able to put on 2 amazing online music festivals, one raising money for the running of our free telephone support service and the other raising money for our EmpowHER project (more information below). Both Festivals were a huge success with many local artists performing for free to support us, jointly generating close to £3000. Our audience stretched far and wide with people listening in India, Finland, Ghana, Uganda, France, Romania, Tunisia, Massachusetts, Norway, Brunei, China & Australia, and well as all over the UK. Many of our community said it was the first time they had been able to attend a festival in this way, sitting in their back gardens, listening to live music, and feeling part of such an event.
Food stalls for Vulnerable Families and their Pets
Our cohort 4 team has chosen a social action project that helps to feed vulnerable individuals and their pets, having researched what community projects have started since lockdown we felt more needed to be done to help individuals struggling to feed their family pets. Pets are extremely important to an individual's well-being and for many pets are the only companions they have had during the lockdown.
A recent ITV Documentary interviewed individuals living on the streets with their pets, it was reported that individuals would rather die than be without their pets. Many of these individuals will be given food by the public passing by or they will attend soup kitchens or pop-up food shops, often their pets are fed human food but wouldn’t it be amazing if pet food was available for these animals? Our cohort 4 team got involved within the community and provided multiple pop-up shops which provided a necessary lifeline to those that needed support when it was needed most.
