Community craft group helping boost wellbeing and confidence

CREATIVITY AND LEARNING TO COPE GO HAND IN HAND

- By DONNA CLIFFORD

THE YMCA Community Craft Club is a free weekly group which started with the residents of YMCA Humber and is now open to the community. Anna Sheppard is part of the Wellbeing team and founder of the Craft Club.

She said: "I'm one of the counsellors here at YMCA and within a lot of our sessions we talk about different coping mechanisms and we talk about distractions. I thought it would be really good to start a group where we can come together as a group and learn different creative techniques.

"We do diamond art, crochet, knitting, artwork, anything that they want to do that can help them with addiction, loneliness, anxiety and depression. It's a group setting, they find it really good because they are communicating with each other. We have been doing the group for about 18 months but after funding from OnGo we have now opened it up to the community too."