MindFood’s Tree of Hope
We are so delighted to have been commissioned to host an event for Creativity & Wellbeing Week this year. It feels like the culmination of a journey we started several years back.
MindFood is essentially a mental health charity with a focus on food-growing as a way to cultivate better wellbeing. But we’ve always been strong believers in co-production, so when we discovered that many of our participants were highly creative we decided to nurture this – first by adorning our garden shed with a Tree of Life (now 7 years old!), and then by introducing a weekly Naturally Creative art group. This has been led since its inception by the incredibly talented Sarah Edwards, who started out as a MindFood participant in need of support. The group has gone from strength to strength!
This year’s event returns to the Tree of Life theme, which we feel embodies what we do – promoting hopefulness, while empowering people to find a way forward that is right for them, and taking them closer to their dreams and aspirations one manageable step at a time.
For Creativity & Wellbeing Week we’re dreaming bigger, and keen to inspire more people to make a difference. This time we are feeling more self-assured, and ready to build the idea into a more outward reaching event to involve more of our local community. We’re inviting 2 local grassroots organisations to help us create a new mural: Umeed, a day centre in Southall, offering social connection and practical signposting support to anyone in need, and GOS@D, who (among many other essential services) run an ESOL group for asylum seekers and others who feel isolated due to language barriers.
We will help participants create their own Tree of Life to take home, encouraging them to identify positive influences in their lives (the roots), their strengths (the trunk), their hopes, dreams and aspirations (the canopy), and the steps they can take to move forward (the branches). Eventually fruits can be added to the trees to celebrate the mini milestones they achieve along the way. The central activity though, will be their contribution to our community mural, adding words of inspiration in their own languages. Over 100 languages are spoken in Ealing, so we’re hoping to promote an aspiration for global peace and unity.
Our regular Naturally Creative participants are preparing the materials for the event, and will be welcoming and supporting our guests. The outward-facing activity will be a milestone in itself for them, on their own individual recovery journeys.
We’ll look forward to sharing how we get on, and hope to inspire many more to create their own Tree of Life, so they can make the idea of Critical Hope a tangible reality.
