The Hope and Healing Project is a community-led social action and system change project building on decades of work and extensive learning from communities, organisations, and practitioners about what it means to make long-term, sustainable differences to people’s lives.
We know that being seen and heard is a mental health intervention. We will work with communities to hear their stories, to make sense of their experiences and have their voices heard by people with power about what needs to change. We will create learning networks for professionals and activists to build trust and mutual support – reducing feelings of isolation, shame and hopelessness that working to create change can bring. We will listen deeply to stories across all layers of the system, sharing the learning via national campaigns to start a conversation about how we create and sustain hope that things can be different, and enable communities to heal from trauma and thrive.
We are seeking funding for a five-year project to deepen and scale existing work, bring together a network of organisations and build meaningful collaboration with communities to create long-lasting, transformational change in how people understand and respond to distress both at a human and policy intervention level.
Working with our partners, the project includes three elements:
1. Communities of Hope: self-sustaining community groups across three areas, using an evidence-based trauma-informed community development approach. We will develop peer-to-peer support networks, exploring how to provide interventions that are trauma-informed, community-led and culturally sensitive – using storytelling for systems change through a place-based approach to improving community wellbeing.
2. Hope Academy: learning networks, tools and support for people and professionals seeking to make change via place-based communities of practice, national events and resources about how to create change through a relational and trauma-informed approach – drawing on learning from the community groups and professionals, co-created for authenticity of voice.
3. Campaign for Hope: national hope and healing conversations – a series of listening exercises and campaigns for change using our Truth Project approach, to hear direct experiences of working / living in traumatised systems and communities so we can advocate with people, policy-makers and leaders across the UK for change.
Central to this work is a recognition of the impact of trauma, interpersonal relationships and the social contexts surrounding people on their mental health. This includes the role organisations and wider systems have in creating the conditions for everyone to thrive. Being trauma-informed in Platfform is about creating psychosocially healthy environments for staff, people we support and the wider systems we are part of.