Accelerate Wellbeing: Reflection on Away Day

For the last two and a half years, the Accelerate Wellbeing project has been supporting five brilliant faith-filled projects across England and Wales that have been tending to the physical and mental health needs of those in their community, often in partnership with the NHS, through impactful, replicable approaches.

As the project will be drawing to a close for this cohort at the end of this year, we were keen to get together in person for those leading the projects to share learning, encourage each other and to pray together, so we gathered at Revival Fires Ministry Centre in Dudley, which is home to one of the Accelerate Wellbeing projects; Listening and Guidance - Social Prescribing Link Workers. 

As one of the team that has been working alongside these projects, I’ve been thinking about our time together a lot since we got together and a few themes keep repeating in my mind that we thought it worth sharing. 

Firstly, and it’s a statement of the obvious perhaps, that it is always good to build friendships and relationships. Time spent getting to know other people, to build networks, to listen and understand, and to encourage one another is always time well spent. We might need to intentionally build it into busy diaries, but it is worth it. Being able to use Zoom or Teams to attend workshops, work through problems and pray together is efficient and amazing in many ways, but not quite the same as being together in a room together!

Secondly, for those in leadership – which can sometimes be a strangely lonely role - it is good to know that we are not alone and that others experience many of the same frustrations, disappointments, joys and questions. Having other like-minded people alongside us in our mission and calling helps share the load of making positive change happen and doing it sustainably. If you’re leading a church or project like these, do seek out trustworthy peers and advisors to have alongside you, if you haven’t already! As we chatted together, we found that many had experienced frustrations in working with the NHS, felt stretched while resources are tight and had faced disappointments when doorways to new opportunities didn’t open, but all had encouraging tips, ideas and resources to share with the others to help overcome those challenges.

Thirdly, it struck me that the way to make as big an impact as possible is to always be open to learning and improvement, and feeling safe enough to explore not only what has worked but what hasn’t worked and what could be done differently, is immensely valuable. In writing about effective social entrepreneurship, Liam Black (the former CEO of Jamie Oliver’s social enterprise restaurants) says in relation to learning and reviewing one’s impact that ‘... if your feedback loop is not making you wince, then it is not working” (Liam Black, The Social Entrepreneur’s A to Z, p.36). What he means is that we should create spaces in which we can admit with a wince perhaps that we tried something and it didn’t work as well as we hoped, or that an approach worked well for one group but not for another, but then to try something different, learn, ask others for advice and do better next time.

Finally, I was powerfully reminded of the place of prayer and gratitude in our lives as Christians, with the day giving time to put into practice Paul’s advice to ‘Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances…’. We shared requests for prayer and plenty of things to give God thanks for, and then prayed together. I left feeling encouraged, grateful to God for all I’d heard, for all of the brilliant projects and for all the work they are doing. It is work that reveals the healing, life-changing Kingdom of God!

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