HEART spotlight Mental Health Week
The HEART team take time out to show thanks for the work of the many volunteers who are helping our local community. It is especially important to recognise the value of supporting the vulnerable and one another as we enter Mental Health Awareness Week.
Tomorrow marks the start of Mental Health Awareness Week (18th - 24th MAY) and the theme is KINDNESS.
Some HEART Volunteers will be helping to distribute some wellbeing postcards for MIND later this week in the Central St Leonards and Hollington area.
For more information regarding MIND and their work as a mental health charity, you can visit their website.
SEND HEART YOUR STORIES!
It’s obviously been a testing time for everyone in recent weeks, but we know there’s also been much joy brought by helping others. We want to celebrate that!
If you’ve got a story about how YOU’VE helped or been helped by someone, this week we’ll be posting them online on Facebook. Even better if you have a picture to go along with it!
Click here to get to HEART Facebook Group. We’d love to hear from you!
HASTINGS FOODBANK NEEDS SUPPLIES
In recent weeks demand on Hastings Foodbank’s service has sky-rocketed. Food donations have increased but last week they spent over £3000 buying food to meet demand. If you can spare some right now, they need urgent supplies of Cereals, Tinned goods, such as tomatoes, tuna and veg, and dry goods, including Pasta. For details of where to drop off and opening times click here.
YOU’RE MAKING SUCH A DIFFERENCE – THANK YOU!
As the real impact of this crisis starts to emerge, a growing number of charities and organisations are finding resources stretched – a situation expected to get worse over the coming months. Here at HEART, we’re being asked to help, and we’d like to thank those of you who’ve stepped up for all your hard work:
Some 27 volunteers are now supporting Children & Families following our call-out last week for people to help at Education Futures Trust. The mountain of clothes, books and food are being sorted, and a team is being built to tackle EFT’s community garden, too.
Thanks, too, to the 50+ HEART volunteers who’ve offered to help with the Connect IN telephone service, being run by Hastings Voluntary Action. We’ll be sending names on tomorrow and hope to run this alongside our own regular follow up phone call service which vulnerable people in the town are finding so reassuring.
And of course, we can’t forget the incredible work being done by the 30+ HEART volunteers who’ve been clocking up hundreds of hours ferrying NHS frontline staff to and from the hospital through the scheme co-ordinated by ‘Hastings Supports our NHS’.
HEART volunteers who’ve been clocking up hundreds of hours ferrying NHS frontline staff to and from the hospital through the scheme co-ordinated by ‘Hastings Supports our NHS’.
Final thank you to all our new HEART Coordinators who are going through training and then will be part of the team that responds to Help Requests, Follow Up phone call service which is growing and also some will be ringing all those registered volunteers we are still trying to contact.
Look out for more specialised emails from HEART coming soon...there are other areas which you may be able to help us.
Need to update your status? Please click on this Heart Volunteer Update form. We will not be contacting Volunteers who are in an At Risk group or Volunteers that are Self Isolating for tasks that involve leaving your home e.g. Shopping