Creating Positive Change: Your Views on our Impact
Scottish Recovery Network Director Louise Christie presents a new visual report outlining your views on our impact.
Our work includes many activities, projects and initiatives which help us to create long-term relationships with recovery innovators. A collaborative and curious approach brings people together to learn from each other and explore new ways of working. A courageous approach provides room to think differently. Creating the space to take risks and to try things that haven’t been done before. The result? New ideas that challenge the wider mental health system and the often-stagnant culture of ‘more of the same’.
Scottish Recovery Network aren’t just teaching folk, they are helping people come along on the journey and providing a lot of much needed hope.
Creating Positive Change, 2023.
Working the way we do can be fast paced. It can feel uncomfortable at times. There isn’t always clarity from the beginning of a project of what the exact outcomes will be. We create spaces for honest conversations that include everyone. Opportunities to develop and explore innovation and question things. Working together towards a commitment to real action to make the changes people actually ask for. This in turn brings about positive change. Change led by people with lived experience. Project partners tell us that there are very welcome and unexpected impacts when working this way. These have often been the source of the greatest learning.
Making Recovery Real is just one example of this approach in action!
Your views on our impact
It’s the final year of our current Strategic Plan A New Future for Mental Health and we are taking stock. We have commissioned Habitus Collective to work with us to better understand the impact of our activities. To inform what and how we deliver our strategic aims in the future.
Stage one of this work has involved speaking with our many partners and the wider mental health recovery community. Through focus groups and interviews Habitus Collective have gathered a wide range of evidence. Evidence that shows the significant role of Scottish Recovery Network in how mental health recovery is viewed in Scotland. Our important role in supporting how it is practised and implemented across the country.
You cannot underestimate the impact or role of Scottish Recovery Network’s behind-the-scenes role for making a project successful.
Creating Positive Change, 2023.
You told us
As our partners you shared that you value our focus on lived experience and peer support. The feedback shows that you appreciate our work in building relationships and allies for change. Our creation of empowering collaborative spaces that often lead to new connections and practical co-designed resources for all to use.
Looking to the future you want to see an even greater focus from us on building relationships for change. You want us to inspire more people, organisations, services, and communities to embrace and celebrate recovery approaches. For us to continue to encourage change in thinking, behaviours, and practice across Scotland’s mental health system.
A space has been created where people who wouldn’t have come together before, are learning from each other.
Creating Positive Change feedback, 2023.
They are blurring the boundaries of community and statutory services.
Creating Positive Change feedback, 2023.
What’s next?
It’s an exciting time as we develop current projects and start new ones. We may be taking stock but we are not losing momentum! We continue to share you want to see from the Scottish Government’s new Mental Health and Wellbeing Strategy. To work with you to make sure lived experience is at the heart of developing mental health support. Other activities for 2023/24 include:
- Creating Hope with Peer Support. A new project working with community-based groups to develop peer support for suicide prevention. at one of our online information sessions.
- of the Let’s do Peer Support: Bump, Birth and Beyond resource and animation!
- Revision of the Peer2Peer training manual and materials – in line with your feedback – to create a new, easier to use resource
- Chances for groups and organisations to learn together as part of our Peer2Peer Development Programme
- The refresh of the podcast series and !
- Sharing your peer support stories and learning to support the development of peer support activities and roles
Watch this space or to find out first!
We look forward to working with you. Together we can make recovery real.
-Louise
