One of my passions is introducing the concepts and practice of health, healing and mindfulness to those working with vulnerable people.
Staff working within settings that provide services which support others will always be able to offer their personal best when their own awareness about health and level of well being increases.
I was delighted to be invited to share this empowering knowledge with Groundswell who are a London based charity that provides inclusive solutions to homelessness.
Groundswell have been doing brilliant work for 16 years and are a formal partner of Thames Reach. They specialise in enabling people with experience of homelessness and rough sleeping to help those facing homelessness and social exclusion.
Part of their work involves Health Peer Advocacy which helps individuals to improve their health and transforms the way the health services interact with homeless people.
I have had many people working within healthcare and social settings attend my workshops so I know how overstretched those working in person centered roles can be. There is a general shift taking place throughout these settings where many of those in management positions are opening to the idea that a person must be healthy themselves, in order to offer health services to others. Empowering individuals with knowledge is even more powerful when they themselves are an example of good health to those they are working with.
Having access to mindfulness, well being and healing techniques when shared in an organisational setting, invokes a culture shift that is much more powerful when undertaken collectively with the encouragement of the leadership.
Athol Halle, the CEO of Groundswell is a forward thinking and progressive leader of this organisation. He was totally on board with offering his staff training and skills that would help them achieve a higher level of personal health at work.
The training sessions were very positively received by staff who were keen to implement these positive collective changes.
The idea that we must help others before helping ourselves is turning around. The most important and giving thing we can do in order to best serve others is take care of ourselves.
I was really honoured to teach the staff team at Groundswell and share my knowledge with them. It is my intention that this will have a far reaching effect in enhancing the brilliant work that they do.
Athol, the CEO at Groundswell has detailed what we covered in the training sessions below and how staff received the time we spent together.
Do you work in a person centered role? How has learning healing techniques helped you to help others more at work? Please share your comments below.
Karina has done a range of work with Groundswell to help us make the organisation a ‘healthier place to work’ this has all very well received and has made big impact on the organisation.
Karina took time to get to know Groundswell before delivering her work and tailored her approach specifically to us. She first ran a session with the whole staff team to help us look at the our ideas of being healthy and how looking after our own health enables us to better support others. This led some clear actions and changes in the work place around issues such as nutrition and eating, drinking water, time management and stress management.
Next Karina delivered a three session set of training on Mindfulness at Work. Again bespoke training was developed. This gave individuals involved specific tools to deal with stress at work (and outside of work) and has contributed to changing the organisational culture to a healthier way of working.
Additionally Karina provided one-to-one support to one member of staff, which had a very positive impact in dealing with stress.
I would strongly recommend Karina – she had a really beneficial influence on Groundswell to help us not only deliver work that improves the health of our clients, but also ensures that our staff and volunteers improve their health.
Athol Halle, CEO Grounswell
