Carer’s First is an organisation that offers specialist support to unpaid carers. Through the Essex Local Delivery Pilot micro-grant fund, Carer’s First have been able to offer carers the chance to learn a new activity and skillset, to help support their mental and physical health. The organisation also creates a space for carers to connect with others.
Jenny Goodson, from Carer’s First explained: “I was keen to start a Pilates/mindfulness group for carers offering them a chance to learn new skills/techniques to help them look after their mental and physical health. There were no funded groups of this nature for carers, so I contacted Pilates instructor Marisa, who has been extremely helpful and supportive, and agreed to take the classes for 12 months.
With the onset of lockdown, Marisa managed to convert classes to online, and began to offer these sessions to a wider demographic of carers. We have successfully held our monthly Care2Relax sessions and on average, 8 carers attend each class. The sessions are recorded and emailed out to approximately 60 carers on our mailing list to enable them to take part at home if they were unable to join. We have purchased items like scented candles, incense, roll on anti-stress aromatherapy, mindfulness cards etc, and posted these resource packs to carers who have been regularly attending the classes. We also have yoga mats available for any carer who needs them.
We have a lovely volunteer, Elaine who came forward and agreed to be trained as a Pilates Instructor. This took around 6-8 months of classes, theory and weekend workshops, but Elaine is brilliant and passed end of last year, with the hope of offering face-to-face classes for Colchester District carers. Elaine has agreed to continue the online zoom classes for the Care2Relax project and I’m extremely proud that we have Essex professionals helping us to achieve our goals.
Initially we had difficulty promoting this fantastic opportunity to carers but with the upgrade and development of our Comms Team this has been rectified and we are reaching carers in all our localities. We would like to offer outdoor classes in the summer and work with LDP Coordinator Sarah Stokes from Active Essex to make this happen. Having to suddenly convert from face-to-face to online was daunting but now that we have achieved this, it has opened the sessions to so many more carers.”
If you want to find out more about their work, then visit their website here: www.carersfirst.org.uk
