Britain Yearly Meeting 2016: Mindful approach works for Quaker Social Action
Quaker Social Action demonstrated techniques used in the 'This Way Up' project
Mindfulness is part of the toolkit Quaker Social Action (QSA) deploys in its This Way Up (TWU) project, which aims to help people set achievable goals and develop coping strategies.
More than forty Friends attended a special interest group on Saturday to hear about the project. It began with a brief explanation of the charity’s work, which focuses on ‘four Fs’: furniture, funerals, finance and fulfilment. Director Judith Moran highlighted its links to Quakerism, and explained that twenty per cent of QSA’s funding comes from Friends. ‘This allows us to test new projects that other charities would struggle with,’ she said.
TWU came about in 2011 when QSA considered how it could help people deal with the welfare reform agenda and austerity. Judith spoke of ‘a tsunami of difficulty’ and explained that people felt unable to change their own lives.
A QSA volunteer who was a trained coach and mindfulness teacher suggested offering both services. The impact of a pilot scheme in 2011 ‘blew our minds’, said Judith. More than a hundred people have since participated, benefitting from both one-to-one coaching and mindfulness, which takes place in small groups. QSA has monitored participants’ progress by measuring them on the World Health Organisation wellbeing index before and after the course. The improvement has been significant.
