People Knitting – Threads of Community Connection

Bethany Sheldon. Arts Derbyshire, Creative in Place (Erewash)

Hi I’m Beth, one of the Arts Derbyshire Creative Health team working as Creative in Place (Erewash). As I begin my blog today, 5 months into my role, I catch myself thinking about my Nan and the speech I gave at her funeral. ‘Come again Beth?’… I hear your baffled reply… ‘What have funerals and Grandmas got to do with your work as CIP Beth?’

Well, let me try and explain. At my Nan’s funeral I gave a speech about how she was a people knitter, how she was always connecting with people. She was always busy running some errand or other, getting some shopping for a friend down the road, picking up the newspapers or prescriptions for others. Her landline phone was always engaged, always chatting, always connecting with friends and the community that surrounded her. She was a natural community weaver, and we were all part of her wonderfully intricately knitted community jumper. In fact, at the funeral, we even gave out little balls of wool and knitting needles for people to wear as badges. My little wool badge sits on a shelf halfway down my stairs and today it caught my eye.

You see 5 months in as CIP Erewash, and I’m really starting to feel and see the gentle threads of wonderful community connections present in Erewash and also the new ones starting to weave together for me and it all feels very exciting.

Last week, I spent a magical Friday morning sitting around the cosy kitchen table of Our Crafty Place in Ilkeston with 4 phenomenal humans… Viv (Our Crafty Place’s Co-Founder) Gemma Armes (Movement Psychotherapist in training and Resident Artist at Ilkon Gallery) Susan Smith (Garden Designer and Community Artist) and Susie Lambert (Walks for Wellbeing and Better Ways for Better Days founder). All these women are doing amazing things in the local community that surrounds Littlewick Medical Centre in Ilkeston, where I’m mainly based.

We are meeting around the table, brews in hand, to continue our chats about collaborating on a Wellbeing Journal Project for Erewash. And the act of starting to work on a project together has also started a lovely moment of people knitting! Our threads are all starting to cross over, there’s sharing of ideas, sharing of contacts and most beautifully also a sharing of support for one another’s wellbeing. This is a wonderful little micro-community existing right here, around the kitchen table, and this is what excites me more than anything!

Through the process of making something and thinking creatively together, what has naturally bubbled up is not only wonderful ways and ideas to work together to support patients’ wellbeing, but also a support system for each other too as a group of people working in creative health.

Chats of exhaustion, struggles and the determination to keep on keeping on is real and are felt and reflected not only around this kitchen table but also in other places I am connected with too. If I rewind back a few weeks to my ‘Prescriptions for Happiness’ staff wellbeing sessions at Littlewick, similar conversations arose around the pressures staff are under to support the community as a health service and the daily challenges they face.

It seems, as soon as we stop to pause and ask ‘How are we?’ we realise that we are not entirely OK. Keeping well and stress free in such chaotic times feels near impossible, so what can we do?

When thinking about getting through those stressful moments the response I’m hearing time and time again is ‘with each other’. Whether that’s the team support I hear about at Littlewick in my wellbeing consultations, patients I observe being given the time to really reflect and connect in sessions with Mental health support workers, community wellbeing groups I’ve visited or our newly formed Journal Project group sitting around the kitchen table.  We all need each other. We are all better when together. When connected and able to support one another. When that people knitted thread runs throughout our day. When we are able to function as a community.

And community support and connection are the overarching theme and inspiration for the Wellbeing Journal Project I’m beginning to develop.

Journals are mentioned a lot in Talking Therapies. On the day I sat in on sessions with one of the Erewash PCN (Primary Care Network) Mental Health Support Workers, 2 of the patients were encouraged to start journaling. During each session I witnessed such care and deep and present listening from the mental health team. Patients seemed to really benefit from the time and human connection, leaving with well-being techniques to try, a plan and a promise of a follow-up email. But in that moment, they stood up to leave the session, I couldn’t help but feel sad that they were leaving empty handed and going out into the world to navigate their mental health journey, alone. And in that moment a seed of an idea landed…What if they didn’t leave empty handed? What if they left with a gift? A gift from the community…a book, to journal in. A book that had woven into its pages, local inspirations to stay happy and healthy, support from voices with similar lived experiences on their doorsteps. What if they left being held in those pages in gentle ways by the local community? If the journal could help people leave more connected, would they leave feeling less alone? 

And so, I began chatting to people and places in the local community and in local healthcare that I had met over the first few months about this idea, and the weaving of people and ideas began to organically flow.

The process of making the wellbeing journal is also intended to be a journey of wellbeing too, so we are working closely with the Erewash Primary Care Network Mental Health Team to support and invite patients to join us for some Creative Wellbeing Taster Sessions, led by local creative health connected people and places.

During these sessions we will gently test out and reflect on creative activities people could do to support their wellbeing that will then become ideas placed into the wellbeing journal.

We are also thinking a lot about legacy in this process. So whenever possible, the community and creatives that lead sessions with the pilot group will already have other community projects running that patients could then connect into after our wellbeing tasters end, continuing those threads of connection.

One of the main hopes I have for this project, is that it goes above and beyond what we physically make (the Wellbeing Journal) and that as a result of making something together / being part of a project together, what also happens is we connect as humans, we people weave, and pass threads between people and places in the community that have not been threaded before.

And we are leading with this connection thread from the very start of the project in how we look to engage patient groups by thinking about friendly ways to begin a connection and break down barriers of uncertainty or anxiety.

So, on Friday as well as sitting around the kitchen table, we also grabbed my phone and made a little intro video that featured all the friendly faces you may meet and the places you may visit if you came to be part of our well-being taster sessions.

This will then be sent out by the Mental Health support workers to patients they have already got a connection with. We hope by following the thread of connection and the people knitting theory we will be able to grow our little micro-well-being community in a supported, big hearted and people friendly way.  A way I think the queen of people knitting, my Nan, would be proud of.