South West England groups

A Space to Speak Your Mind

A Space to Speak Your Mind is a mental health radio show and podcast in collaboration with Source FM and Cornwall Mind. The show broadcasts live on Source FM 96.1 FM on the first Thursday of every month at 2:30pm.

Aim2Be

Aim2Be is an alternative and holistic health service run by Aimee and Blaise, who are energy healers and empowerment event planners. They run reiki and yoga sessions as well as other events around Bristol and the South-West.

Auti.ms

Auti.ms is an Bristol based charity that aims to raises awareness of the ways in which Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) may present in females and to provide support for females with ASC traits as well as their parents or carers. They carry out a number of functions, including keep up to date with current research, creating social groups for females with ASC, liaising with local authority providesr and healthcare professionals and educating teachers, parents and carers about how to identify and support females with ASC in the classroom.

Braillists Foundation

The Braillists is a grassroots community group connecting Braille readers with Braille technology developers and funders. They aim to promote the value of Braille as a literacy tool that enriches the lives of blind people, support efforts to make affordable Braille and similar technologies available to all blind people and provide an open forum for the exchange of ideas about the development of future Braille technology.

Bristol Hospitality Network (BHN)

Bristol Hospitality Network works alongside asylum seekers facing destitution by sourcing hosted accommodation and creative community engagement across the city. They provide full board accommodation for their members in host households and in their men’s hostel in Bristol, as well as opportunities in community volunteering. They also run a drop-in session and provide a hot meal every Monday at their Welcome Centre, offer legal advice & support and host events.

Clarity are a Mental Health Charity providing services and support to people experiencing mental health and emotional issues.

Coronavirus Community Help Taunton

Coronavirus Community Help Taunton is a Facebook group that brings together those in need and those offering to help in the Taunton area, offering services such as delivery of shopping and collection of prescriptions.

Dorset HealthCare University NHS Foundation Trust provides integrated community health and mental health, specialist learning disability services, community brain injury, community dental services including community hospitals and prison healthcare. Their vision is to "provide care all of us would recommend to family and friends"

Dorset Mind

Dorset Mind is a local charity that educates, challenges mental health stigma and inequality, and promotes recovery by empowering individual to develop resilience. Their support groups, counselling and befriending service help people regain social skills, and they also deliver educational wellbeing programmes for schools and workplaces and provide volunteer opportunities across all areas of the organisation.

Exim Dance Company

Exim is a company of artists and practitioners creating professional dance theatre and educational outreach pathway programmes in the South West of England. They exist to provide opportunities for ‘at risk’ young people to participate in socially engaged dance classes. They are passionate about using dance to help vulnerable young people, breaking down the ideological barriers that surround dance and holding inclusivity at the heart of all their work.

Forest Holme Hospice Charity

Forest Holme Hospice Charity supports Forest Holme Hospice’s provision of palliative and end of life care across Poole, Wimborne and the Isle of Purbeck. They aim to enhance the lives of adults in Dorest with life limiting illness through clinical excellence, service and compassionate care.

Healthwatch Cornwall are a small organisation with a big remit – to ensure health and social care services in Cornwall are the best they can be for you, now and in the future. By listening to your experiences of publicly funded health and social care services they are able to inform decisions made by the commissioners and providers of them. This means your voice is heard by those planning and delivering services and can influence positive outcomes.

Healthwatch Wiltshire exists to speak up for local people on health and care. This requires the organisation to reach out across the county to listen to local people about their experiences of services – good and bad. With this information, Healthwatch Wiltshire aims to influence the people who buy and provide our health and care services. The organisation also has an important role in providing information and advice to local people.

Heart of Torbay CIC

Heart of Torbay CIC is a social enterprise that exists to help support, motivate and improve the lives and mental wellbeing of those living and working in Torbay, South Devon. They provide coaching, mentoring, training, talks, workshops, mediation, alternative therapies and social prescribing activities.

Ilminster Town Council

Ilminster Town Council carries out a number of functions including managing the cemetery, looking after open spaces such as the recreation ground, Britten’s Field, the canal and Herne Hill, providing and maintaining play facilities and maintaining street furniture. In addition, the Town Council acts as an important channel or platform for local people’s views or concerns.

JIGSAW Thornbury

JIGSAW Thornbury supports families with children aged 0-25 who have any additional needs or disabilities, from learning needs such as dyslexia to complex disabilities or medical problems. They provide regular activities such as their lending library and support groups. They also run bookable events in the holidays and after school, which include forest schools, horse riding, therapeutic music sessions and dance classes. They also run training sessions for parents and carers and run a scheme for young volunteers.

Led By Dreams CIC

Led By Dreams CIC aims to help victims understand the signs of domestic violence. They create innovative products and services and collaborate with organisations and agencies to provide support to domestic abuse survivors.

Lupton House

Lupton House is a Grade II* building set in parkland on the outskirts of Brixham. The Lupton Trust was formed by a group of local people to breathe life back into Lupton House which was an old empty school, gardens and woods in Brixham. Pooling the communities’ enthusiasm, skills and expertise, they developed Lupton House into an environmentally sustainable space for the whole community, enabling local people, groups, charities, arts and environmental projects to grow.

Male Survivors Trust (previously known as AMSOSA) provides support and training to male survivors of sexual abuse and to agencies around the UK. Based in Swindon, Male Survivors Trust offers support online to all male survivors, wherever they are in the world, via email and their online forums for male survivors and their partners.

Opoka

Opoka is a specialist service working to stop domestic violence against women and children in the Polish community. Their aim is to help create a world free of domestic violence against Polish women and their children where women feel safe, secure and can engage and participate in society. Services they offer include a helpline, advice, crisis response, advocacy, DV outreach and therapy amongst others.

Positive Steps is a Bristol-based mental health self-help peer support group that has been running for over 10 years. We provide a safe social space for people with anxiety, depression and other mental health related issues.

Positive Steps is for adults over the age of 18.

We meet at Emersons Green Village Hall, Bristol every Friday between 1.30pm and 4pm and the space is for everyone to socialise and discuss their issues in a friendly, supportive atmosphere and in doing so, help each other.

SafeBreaks Devon CIC

SafeBreaks Devon CIC was set up to run alongside SafeBreaks Holidays Ltd in order to help raise funds for their service users, enabling them to provide a more enhanced and bespoke service. Funds raised have paid for items such as pop-up kitchens and equipment, an allotment space, equipment and staff, allowing them to provide holistic sessions as well as a multi-sensory chill-out room. They also provide a day centre, supported housing, a respite flat, a training house and support in the community for people that have additional needs.

Self Injury Self Help (SISH)

Self Injury Self Help (SISH) is a Bristol based community organisation who have been running self help groups for 15 years for people who self injure. The groups provide a friendly, safe, non-judgemental space to meet others who understand the issues faced by a person who uses self injury/self harm, currently or in the past.

Please note that due to the COVID-19 crisis, the SISH support group is currently closed.

We focus on improving support and knowledge around self-injury by:
offering safe spaces where we listen and never judge, and demonstrating the impact of this support;
creating experience-led tools and information on topics clients tell us they want to know about;
promoting better models of support through training health and social care workers of the future;
working with researchers and policy makers to make sure what people tell us they want is put into practice

We run a UK-wide multi-channel support service for women & girls affected by self-injury, trauma and abuse
We develop up-to-date, reliable and free information and self help tools for anyone to use
We run training and consultancy to share knowledge and expertise with a wide range of staff, especially in health, social care and education
We partner with other organisations and researchers to find out directly from those with lived experience of self-injury find helpful in their lives

Shaftesbury Mental Health Peer Support Group

Shaftesbury Mental Health Peer Support Group runs two peer-to-peer mental health support groups in Shaftesbury on the first and third Thursdays of the month, the former generally including a theme or activity and having guest speakers, and the latter being a purely social get-together.

SM Space Cafe

SM Space Cafe is an online initiative to support teenagers and adults who have selective mutism or may now be recovered. The group also welcomes parents of children with selective mutism and members of professional bodies such as teachers or speech and language therapists who wish to be supportive and maybe learn more. The cafe is a safe space to chat, make friends and share ideas.

You can find the Facebook group here.

Studio 4 Dance

Studio 4 Dance is a dance company based in St Austell, Cornwall. They teach dance throughout the Cornish area and the South West, specialising in urban styles and including jazz, ballet, lyrical, musical theatre, commercial and contemporary. Catering for all ages, they have dance classes for fun as well as their intensive training for competitive teams and performance.

Sunshine and Showers Peer Support

Sunshine and Shower is a peer support group based in Truro, Cornwall that offers a safe space every two weeks for people with long term health coniditions, both mental and physical, to get together at Truro Bowling Alley to share infromation about recovery skills.

Speak Up Somerset is a non-profit organisation run by people directly affected by mental distress, to provide support, run training courses, promote recovery and campaign on mental health issues. Their “Art of Recovery” project can also be found online via Facebook and Twitter under Art of Recovery UK, which they use to promote their events and resources.

Swindon Mind provides advice, support and services to empower anyone experiencing a mental health  problem in Swindon. They campaign to improve services, raise awareness and promote understanding.

The Bridge Collective offers opportunities for social contact and mutual support, learning, teaching, discussion, being active and making a valid contribution both to the Bridge Collective itself and to the wider world.

We’re a charity that brings belief, hope and long-term recovery to people whose lives have been torn apart by addiction and the multiple and complex needs that come with it. We provide residential addiction treatment to men and women. We also support women in the community who are in contact with the criminal justice system.

TRIP Community Transport Association

TRIP is a Honiton-based charity that is dedicated to relieving rural isolation and loneliness in East Devon by providing affordable transport, specialised disability equipment and a personal befriending service.

The Wiltshire and Swindon User’s Network is a user-led organisation formed of health and social service users, with the aim to promote user involvement and support people to have a voice. They support members to campaign on issues that affect them and be involved in projects to influence their community.