Date: September 2021- December 2021
Funded by: Hackney Giving
Coordinator: Gülnur Salih and Project Worker: Papatya Alkan Genca
With this project, we wanted to improve the health and wellbeing of Turkish community by working closely with City and Hackney Public Health Team; provide information and means to improve members wellbeing.
Some of the activities provided
We providing a platform for over50s to come together to learn and socialize in a friendly environment. To this end, we run Tea Clubs, organised coach trips, and prepared gardening activities. We used our Tea Club as an opportunity to inform our service users about mental health, inviting health professionals and relevant stakeholders for face-to-face meetings. As a result of these activities, our service users became more resilient in dealing with loneliness, they have a better understanding of health-related issues and the most current information/service available to them in Hackney and neighbouring boroughs.
“Access Bar” (hands-on therapy for members to open energy channels )
We provided free one-to-one “Access Bar” (hands-on therapy to open energy channels) therapy for our service users (20 minutes per person). At each session, 4-5 people benefitted from this service. This therapy is delivered by Mavis Gülcan Güner.
We also organised practical/enjoyable activities such as preparing probiotic pickles for the winter, making fig jam, and a fun trivia quiz on life in the UK. On average, 6 people attended the tea club meeting.
In one of our activities we gave them a piece of paper and asked them to complete the sentence: “If I could change one thing about my life it would be …” Then we discussed why they would like to do so and used this discussion to segue into talking about their general well-being.
We used our tea club meeting as an opportunity to alleviate our service users’ concerns/anxieties related to Covid-19 and the pandemic in general.
Weekly Activities We Carried Out:
- 29 September 2021: Lateral Flow Test Kit Demonstration (6 people)
- 06 October 2021: How to Make Fig Jam (9 people)
- 13 October 2021: How to Prepare Probiotic Pickles (6 people)
- 20 October 2021: Group Discussion on the open-ended question: “If I could change one thing about my life it would be …” (5 people)
- 27 October 2021: Awareness on Spina Bifida and Neural Tube Defects
- 11 November 2021: Group Discussion on well-being: how did Covid-19 affect our mental health (5 people)
- 17 November 2021: Trivia Quiz on Life in the UK + Access Bar Therapy. Today, 8 people had their therapy.
- 24 November 2021: Music + Access Bar Therapy (6 people)
- 01 December 2021: Access Bar Therapy + Group Discussion (8 people)
- 08 December 2021: Access Bar Therapy + Lateral Flow Test (10 people)
- 15 December 2021: Access Bar Therapy (5 people)
- 22 December 2021: Access Bar Therapy (4 people)
Concerns/Challenges of our members
The number of people attending the tea club reduced due to Covid-19. On the one hand, we appreciate their concern for being in a closed environment with multiple people from outside of their household, on the other hand, it made it difficult to help them as much as we would have liked to.
One of our service users did not believe in the efficacy or the necessity of vaccines. Although we offered the latest guidance and information on why and how the vaccines work, she remained unflinching in her conviction. This proves that we will not be able to reach everyone despite our best efforts.
We were able finish this project by providing useful activities to our members as usual.
