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So the 3 essential ingredients for a social contact project are, number one
they're public:
so people who don't have experience of a mental health problem and,
whether they know it or not,
may discriminate against people who do.
Number 2: people with lived experience of mental health problems
and thirdly a hook to bring those 2 together.
So in order to reach people without experience of mental health problems, you
might want to consider working in partnership. A good example of working
in partnership is a local Mind association that linkeded up with
a large mosque in their area
and their local university
and through these partnerships was able to reach lots of people in their local
communities.
So the second ingredient to a social contact project is people with
experience of mental health problems. Now these people are the most
important resource in your project.
Going out into the public and speaking openly about your experience of mental health problems
is a very difficult thing to do.
So you need to think about what training and what support your volunteers will need
to do this. They're committing a lot of their time and energy energy
and so it's important that you think about what they'll get out of the
projects as well.
So the 3rd ingredient in a social contact project is the hook.
This is a way of bringing together than people with experience of mental health problems
and members of the public.
You're hook needs to be attracting people without experience of mental health
problems
and that needs to be create the right atmosphere to let conversations
happen.
But remeber that it is a means to an ends. Its it's not the main focus of the project.
It's just a way to get conversation started. An example of this would be an
song writing workshop so the public is attracted by the idea of coming along
and learning about song writing and then once they're there you can start conversations about
mental health.