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Sisters In Mind celebrates after receiving £91k of National Lottery funding to develop its community hubs for women
Local community group, Sisters In Mind, is today celebrating after being awarded £91k in National Lottery funding to support its work with women’s health and wellbeing. The group, based in Ponders End Enfield will use the money to increase their hub sessions, train women to be peer mentors and offer courses in self-care.
Sisters In Mind has been running since 2020 and is staffed by 6 volunteers. It was founded by Maria Aciyan, Patricia James, Elizabeth Thomspon and Angela Cousins who realized that women were struggling to connect with others and their mental health was being affected by the isolation and restrictions of the pandemic.
The group currently runs one Hub session per week but with the help of this amazing award Sisters In Mind are partnering up with Ponders End Community Development Trust and Community Aid Enfield and will expand its reach by increasing to three Hub sessions per week. The sessions offer women an opportunity to connect to others, learn new skills, build confidence and improve their ability to self-care in a safe, non-judgmental environment.
The new funding from The National Lottery Community Fund, which distributes money raised by National Lottery players for good causes and is the largest community funder in the UK, will see new sessions offering opportunities for women to take more control over their group and train to become peer mentors to support more women. For the first time we will be able to offer sessions where women can bring their children along, to alleviate the stress of finding childcare. The fund will afford us a sessional creche worker to support this activity.
At the same time, the project will be able to offer Advocacy services through our partners Community Aid. In addition wellbeing courses four times a year will support women to adopt a more positive approach to self-care and will include mindfulness, journalling, communication and physical exercise sessions.
The National Lottery Community Fund recently launched its new strategy, ‘It starts with community’, which will underpin its efforts to distribute at least £4 billion of National Lottery funding by 2030.
As part of this, the funder has four key missions, which are to support communities to come together, be environmentally sustainable, help children and young people thrive and enable people to live healthier lives.
National Lottery players raise over £30 million a week for good causes across the UK. Thanks to them, last year The National Lottery Community Fund was able to distribute over half a billion pounds (£615.4 million) of life-changing funding to communities.
To find out more visit www.TNLCommunityFund.org.uk
