Harmless's blog

The Harmless book project is going strong, and we recently had confirmation that Meera Syal will be writing the foreword for the book. We are delighted to have her support, and hope that we will be able to use this endorsement to reach further with the book!

:-)

Harmless's good news a few weeks back, about the contract we had secured from Nottingham Healthcare Trust, seems to get better. Not only will this money secure support for healthcare staff, Harmless shall directly be involved in a new wave of services for people that self harm and shall be delivering face to face support services for people who self harm.

We have now occupied our new office and support space in Nottingham, and are ready to start!

Harmless have secured a one year contract to be providing Nottingham healthcare with full time support, to enhance and inflluence their capacity to help people who self harm. This is the real hands on work, where we can start to influence the stigma and shame that exists in healthcare practices. We are grateful for the reception we have received form Nottingham City Healthcare, and can't wait to get started.

We really are starting to see signs of change. The contract is initially for one year, and funds three people to be working to support healthcare staff.

 Hi everyone,

As Caroline mentioned in her last blog, her, James and me (Hannah) have recently been out and about fundraising for Harmless, we have had bucket collections and information stands in two supermarkets, across four days. The level of ignorance was unbelievable, if somewhat expected, here are some of the comments we received...

- You can solve that problem really easily [self-harm], just take the knives off them.

Members of the Harmless team have been out and about. Our vision for creating this exciting new book about self harm, is to change perceptions and ignorance, and reach out to people. To do that we would like to have a launch event where people can learn about self harm in a non-threatening way. We have been trying to raise funds for this event, and it has been going well. We have been out and about, and Hannah and James, two of the members, along with myself (Caroline) have been raising funds.

 postcards are now in full swing, we're out collecting work from those who want to submit and we've had more artwork submissions.

Hannah has announced that she will be shaving her head to raise money at Nottingham pride and the joint efforts of Caroline, James and Hannah helped raise around £700 from bucket collections.

well saturday saw another book meeting and things are looking good!  submissions are coming in steadily and ideas of where and how we can generate more submissions are making things look promising. fingers crossed.

Heather

Just checking in to say that the book is starting to generate sumissions. For the first time, a few days ago - I started to feel excited about the potential for the product. It is great.

Although we have not been inundated with responses, and submissions, what we have is strong, and will shift perceptions - please, if anyone is interested, get in touch!

inourownwords@hotmail.co.uk

Caroline.

Hey all!