News > Goals supporting Cyrenians

The final workshop of Photography for Wellbeing took place this week. Here is some of the feedback received: These therapeutic workshops turned out to be a massive hit among all the participants including service users, peer support and support workers, volunteers and trustees! The non-hierarchical, non-judgmental, light nature of the workshops supported people to open up, share their stories and experiences. Many said their favourite part was hearing the stories and the talking time they all received to share how they interpret the photos. And of course, the food was delightful and made the space more welcoming.

According to our service user, ‘A’, his achievement was,” …taking pride in being part of the group.”

Another service user, a self-proclaimed loner, said he felt listened to without judgement and now is more amenable to participate in other group activities. His delight in his work, sharing his photos was for all to see.

Jayne, our trustee felt that having built connections with each other, we’d like to revisit our group in future and maybe we should look into longer courses as 6 weeks turned out to be too short and we weren’t ready to say our good-byes.

For many other service users these workshops helped them with battling isolation and expressing themselves. They said that they enjoyed socialising and communicating in English gave them more confidence in their English-speaking skills.

‘J”s golden moment was the Kenilworth trip we went on as a group and was thankful that his support worker Maria made special effort in driving him and the other service users from Warwickshire every week so that they can all participate and benefit from these workshops.

‘S’ mentioned that, “feeling part of the group and opening up was very comforting.”

And our volunteer, Oksana shared that she’d share the photos with her husband who is currently at the war-front in Ukraine to stay connected with him and the friendly atmosphere of the group kept her coming back.

For the Peer Support Worker Somya, these workshops were very inspiring and were helpful in shedding the labels we usually wear.

Martyn Blair Counselling said “The final day of our 6 week course was celebrated with a presentation of certificates, photos and a wonderful buffet lunch. It has been a privilege to watch our group grow over time, seeing them becoming confident with the images they had formed and in their ability to talk about what they had created. The group supported each other when people chose to talk about their stories, we also had a lot of fun”.