Hannah is now at Allotment Support Worker at Manchester Mind but started off as a volunteer. Below she shares her story and the role nature plays in her own mental health:
I began working with Manchester Mind as allotment support volunteer, which came about through a confluence of circumstance, timing, and training and generally things starting to realign in my own life after a significant period of illness. Growing up in the countryside instilled in me a deep connection with being in nature and where I first experienced how it helped me regulate and find stillness. In the process of returning to work, I began with the knowing that part of my recovery needed to bring this connection into my place of work to support and maintain my health going forwards.
I learnt about Mind’s wellbeing allotment sessions through attending some free advice work training with Manchester Volunteer Advice Partnership and with Manchester Mind. This led me to looking for opportunities to volunteer where I might be able to use some of this learning alongside supporting a new direction in my work, which was evolving partly through a Forest Gardening course with The Orchard Project to think about community and regenerative growing.
Being an Allotment Support Volunteer was a lovely role to introduce me back to work, to Manchester Mind and its ethos. Caz who runs the sessions on a Wednesday, Dionne who supports our volunteers, and the existing volunteers at the sessions, instantly made me feel welcome and valued. As a volunteer you are there primarily there to support others, we often worked on a 1-2-1 basis but would also come together as a group too for some activities, especially as people’s confidence grew within themselves and the group.
Of course there are so many benefits that you experience too within the volunteer role from meeting, sharing, and learning with others and being outside in the fresh air on the allotment, whether supporting someone to grow and nurture seedlings or tending to someone else’s needs, noticing the changes in a plants growth and response to the changes of season, or working together to pollard and train the willow that grows over the entrance to the allotment, into an arch.
It was through my volunteering and recent training that I felt ready to apply when the position as Allotment Support worker with Manchester Mind was advertised. I was delighted to be offered the role which I began in August. I run two weekly sessions with our partners from Ethnic Health Forum and Safety 4 Sisters. Each partner’s group has eight weekly sessions created to support their wellbeing and connection to green space through growing and maintaining the allotment, mindfulness and nature-based activities, and crafts.
The sessions aim to offer a quiet place to reflect, to connect and build a deeper connection with ourselves and each other, to learn and share different cultural experiences of growing, gardening, and to experience the seasons and cycles of nature. It’s such a pleasure meeting and welcoming people to allotment and their becoming part of the community that tends to it.
