Cultivate - a new season begins

Spring is a time of new life and a new service is starting at New Hope this month.

Cultivate offers a flexible approach, focusing on therapeutic activities, specifically horticultural therapy, but also including art, writing, music, life skills and practical activities. As Cultivate begins, the Community Market Garden service ends. The garden will continue to be used for some Cultivate activities but Ian and Lee (who were the garden team and are now the Cultivate team) are more likely to be found running activities with residents in our accommodation services. Ian, now a qualified horticultural therapist, with input from Lee and other New Hope colleagues, has created and developed Cultivate. We are excited about this new therapeutic approach and believe it has great potential to help people recover from trauma, substance misuse and mental health challenges. We have already seen how running activities in our rehab and recovery accommodation makes a big difference, not just to the individuals who take part but to the service as a whole. One Sanctuary resident who took part in the activity programme during the first lockdown said:

“I’m certain that my personal recovery from addiction has been greatly encouraged by engaging with the activities and also by the simple fact of having somewhere to go during the daytime.”

Residents at the Sanctuary, New Hope House and the Community Home are already enjoying a six-week 'Sprouting Out' programme, which focuses on a range of life skills, such as cooking (the first session was pizza making), planting and making things.