Supporting Our Community Finalist for Scottish Charity Awards

Supporting Our Community based in Hamilton is a social and wellbeing hub which offers activities and mental health support! Since opening in June 2019 development officers from VASLan have helped to provide support and guidance to the team!

We are so excited that SOC is a finalist in this year’s Scottish Charity Awards!

Mark Rouse, Project Co-ordinator, shared how the project began:
"The initial plan for Supporting our Community was to open a centre to provide support to families who were struggling to access the statutory services that already seemed unable to cope with the ongoing mental health crisis in our community and beyond.

The need for our charity was reinforced when on the 10th December 2018 my 16-year-old daughter, Darian, took her own life. This tragedy strengthened our resolve to make a difference within our community and provide a safe place for other families to receive support and be signposted to other agencies.

We, like many other families, had battled with local services trying to get support, however because Darian did not tick the appropriate boxes these doors were closed until it was too late.

All involved in SOC knew, we had to continue as, we had to focus on helping as many people in the community as possible. In designing our activities, we engaged with local people and listened to the needs of the community.

It was decided the best way to help would be to provide classes, training programmes and support groups. We hoped that by using these non-clinical methods of engagement a wider range of people could access some support, however limited that may be.

We only opened in June 2019 and already we have hosted training courses in suicide awareness and suicide talk, these were attended by 40 members of our community. We have also helped 12 of our service users gain a qualification in Indian head massage. To date our largest achievement is getting 16 people to complete the Scottish Mental Health First Aider course allowing us to send qualified mental health first aiders back into the community.

Darian was always keen to help others in need, despite her own struggles with anxiety and depression, and this is a Charity she would have been proud to be part of.”

You can vote for SOC here:
https://scvo.org.uk/scottish-charity-awards/finalists-2020