safety, hope & community
Women Rising Enabling Community Champions
In 2022/2023 Gather worked with St Giles to offer the WREN program, training for Community Champions - women with lived experience, to use their experiences to create a positive change for themselves and other women in their communities.
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The Gather WREN program was funded by St Giles Trust.
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Through the WREN (Women Rising Enabling Neighbourhoods) project, Gather volunteers were trained to become Women Community Champions, providing support to other women in their communities.
What WREN enabled us to do...
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Christmas & Valentines events - which widened our reach to an additional 200+ women.
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City & Guilds accredited training - Mental Health Awareness (MHA), Trauma Informed Practice (TIP) & Learn To Advise
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Purchasing books & therapeutic resources
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We purchased a subscription for e-learning which we can offer to all our volunteers.
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We have commissioned a training course (listening skills, communication, phases of a crisis, empathy etc) to further train our volunteers, which we will hopefully be able to roll out in Autumn ‘23
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We were able to create a better learning environment for our volunteers by purchasing learning aids.
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We set up two new Digital Skills Workshops (DSW’s) - spaces for people in Thanet to get support with learning how to use a computer.
This is why we do what we do...
stories of lives impacted
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“Liz” was given an invitation to come to Gather by one of our WCCs at a wellbeing group that they are both part of. But her anxiety was too much. She was given another invitation to Gather, a rose and gift pack on Valentines Day and said “It’s a sign!” that she should try to come to Gather, which she did with a family member. Her anxiety is still a challenge, but after 5 weeks she was able to stay for a whole session.
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“Mary” was writing a novel- by hand! She was thrilled to hear that we were going to be running the Digital Skills Workshop (DSW) as she had just bought a laptop and was not confident in using it. In the early days, it was still rather overwhelming, but she came back almost every week to receive support and is slowly managing to digitise her novel.
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“Yasmin” was given a device by her children, but did not know how to use it. She heard that we were running DSW at our Gather drop-in. Therefore, she brought her device along for 1:1 support, in a cosy ‘non-classroom’ environment, where she feels safe.
