Well, it's been a busy, trying year so far, for everyone involved with Mid Staffs Mind.
We lost out on a significant contract; we lost most of our staff; we lost our core funding. We also lost our staid sense of entitlement, our dull stability, and our lack of urgency. 'Shutting up shop' was an option seriously considered. However, we didn't lose our hope, nor our faith in our small, local communities of support.
We know the 'family' of Mid Staffs Mind offers something quite unique among the support organisations in the various localities in which we are based - real care and concern. Not for 'clients', 'service users', or patients, but care and concern for, and between, friends.
Mid Staffs Mind began some 25 years ago, with a group of like-minded people sitting around a kitchen table and identifying the lack of 'true care' in the community: services can be found, treatment is to be had, but heartfelt concern and a willingness to 'be there' for folk was, and is, 'thin on the ground'. Those people helped develop our local, responsive charitable group that sought, and seeks still, to fill those gaps.
As an organisation, there are many things we may hope to achieve - activities to be funded, projects to set up, targets to achieve - but our real mission is simplicity itself... to care about, and for, people in our local communities who experience the limitation, pain, and stigma that are twinned with mental health concerns and mental illness.
The Board of Trustees, Members, Service Users, Volunteers, Staff, and Friends of Mid Staffs Mind are currently engaged in a task critical for this organisation - to keep it simple, and continue to care. We have no master-plan nor special strategy; we're not striving to keep a 'third sector business' afloat; it's not about status or influence. Our central hope is small but perfectly formed - we're good at caring, we mean it, and we want to carry on doing it... to that end, we will do what we have to to stay around...
... and this blog is one way to keep us visible, in touch with our communities, and able to be influenced by you folk in'em.
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