Hi All
Well, what a hectic few months it has been! In April, Karen Cort came across from another project to work as Volunteer Co-Ordinator. She is an ‘old hand’, having worked at V4C for 5 years and came along just in time to help the launch of the Service, on 16th April. After all that time spent writing up the project, it was exciting to actually see it up and running at last, though quite nerve-wracking!
At that stage, 3 mentors were in place covering the South of the County – Gill, Lisa and Tim. All have a good length of abstinence from their substance of choice and come to the role with a high degree of self-awareness, enthusiasm and compassion.
What’s Happened So Far …..
Although we were all expecting some teething problems, any tweaks so far have been minor and some excellent work has been done by the mentors. Lessons were learnt from the first ones, in that it became apparent the targets set at the initial 3 way meeting needed to be precise and specific, with mini targets to work towards being set each week between the mentor and mentee. This avoids the meetings becoming just a ‘catch-up’ and ‘sound-off’ arrangement. Whilst that has short term benefits, it doesn’t help service users to make plans for the future and work towards their goals in the long term.
Three placements have been completed so far and we have seen the service users’ levels of confidence and self-respect grow over the weeks. Of the 3 mentees who completed their placements with V4C, the links between aftercare agencies were apparent, in that one mentee was referred to Progress 2 Work, as he was ready to seek employment, the second was transferred to Cranstoun, as he felt he needed a little more support. The third mentee returned to her job, initially on a part-time basis and by the end of the placement was back into full-time work. All remained clear of their substance of choice for the 6 weeks and we will be following their progress on a 3 and 6 monthly basis in the future.
We have also trained another 3 mentors for the South - Ed, Lou and Pete, who are all keen to get going and get the bit between their teeth.
Four further mentorships are going on at the moment and the word seems to be out about the effectiveness of the Service so far. Certainly, all the agencies who refer people for detox (CDT, Cranstoun and Warwickshire CPNs) are well on-board and see this as an important stepping stone to keeping service users engaged in aftercare well into and thereby sustained recovery.
What a result!
Recruitment in the North
We always knew that recruiting mentors in the North of the County would not come as easily as it has done in the South, mainly due to the fact that we do not have a local presence who is familiar with the area from the Service.
There are potentially 6 ex-service users interested in being mentors in the North, in addition to a further 2 who will be added to the existing 6 in the South, so we are looking forward to being able to start the third lot of training in mid-August or early September.
This is all excellent news, as our target for October was to have 8 mentors in place, so we’re currently well ahead and I’m still stunned by the amount of interest that has been shown by both ex-service users, providers and service users themselves. All that hard work was well worth it!
Karen is a tremendous asset, running the Service on a day-to-day basis (far more efficiently now I have stopped ‘sticking my oar in’!), so that I can focus on training, streamlining administration and looking at ways of diversifying the peer mentoring to adapt to the changes in Warwickshire substance misuses services that are likely to be taking place in the future.
If you would like to know more about the project, please give us a call on 02476 700356 and ask for either Karen or Sara or email us at karen@v4c.or.uk or sara@v4c.org.uk
