Community project honoured with mental health award win
A community project working with vulnerable people has won an important mental health award.
Brushstrokes work to support asylum seekers, migrants and refugees in Sandwell and the Black Country, providing them with practical help, education and housing support, among other services.
Its holistic approach to supporting the mental health and wellbeing of new arrivals to the region has seen it provide its services to people from more than 65 countries.
This work, which has taken place in different location around Smethwick for 20 years, has been recognised at the 2020 Thrive Awards.
The awards celebrate the people, teams or organisations who have made a significant contribution to improving mental health in their area.
Brushstrokes was the recipient of Black Country Team, Service or Organisation, an award it was nominated for by Healthy Sandwell, the public health team of Sandwell council.
Project manager Dave Newell said he was surprised to find Healthy Sandwell had nominated Brushstrokes for the award, but said it was great recognition of the work the service was doing.
He said: “There’s always been an understanding of the role that Brushstrokes plays in supporting mental health and wellbeing of new arrivals, but also the work that we do in going out and finding very vulnerable individuals in the community.
“I think it’s fantastic to see that the mental health needs of the communities and work by our staff and volunteers are being recognised within the wider health sector.”
Brushstrokes is a partnership project of Father Hudson’s Care, the Infant Jesus Sisters, the parish of St Philip Neri and the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd.
Father Hudson’s senior fundraising officer Jinny Cullen spoke about the importance of the award for an organisation like Brushstrokes. She said: “The award is really important as it increases our visibility locally and nationally and improves our relationships with stakeholders which is validation for the volunteers and staff.
“Having a stakeholder like Healthy Sandwell pick us out of all the volunteer organisations they could have chosen just makes everybody feel so good.”
“It brings us to the awareness of the business community and building partnerships with those communities is very important for the long term sustainability of a project like Brushstrokes.”
Brushstrokes has started a number of services over the last few years for the provision of mental health services of people using Brushstrokes.
These include the Asylum Early Action project, which helps to discover and implement services that help people in the asylum system before they reach crisis point.
Dave Newell said the award could help with developing a more structured approach to mental health and increase the number of services available to refugees and asylum seekers.
He said: “It also helps other organisations to understand how the work we do is actually preventing people falling into even poorer mental health.
“It recognises the value of what we do in terms of welcome, social connection and giving people purposeful activity.
“It also shows the impact that volunteering particularly might make in terms of the mental health of some other individuals who who can’t work because of their immigration status.”
To find out more about the work Brushstrokes do, go to brushstrokessandwell.org.uk
