Health in Mind receives £2000 donation from Amazon Edinburgh

Staff and volunteers at a mental health and wellbeing charity have received a £2,000 donation from Amazon Development Centre Scotland in Edinburgh.

Health in Mind has been promoting mental health and wellbeing in Scotland since 1982. The charity provides a wide range of services such as Peer Connections Edinburgh, which helps adults who want to improve or manage their mental health by spending time with a peer volunteer  that has their own experiences of mental health recovery. 

The charity also runs iThrive Edinburgh, an online resource hub for the people of Edinburgh that provides information on mental health and wellbeing. 

The donation from Amazon will go towards supporting their vital work in Edinburgh, including our Peer Connecting Service and Equal Access, which supports people from ethnic minority communities

Commenting on the donation, Graeme Smith, Managing Director at Amazon Development Centre Scotland, said: “We are pleased to support the great work of Health in Mind with this donation.

“The staff and volunteers go the extra mile to ensure the people of our community struggling with their mental health are supported.”

Lynne Stanford, Fundraising Manager from Health in Mind, said: “We want to say a huge thank you to Graeme and the Amazon team for this donation.

“It means a great deal to us to have this support at this time – COVID-19 has had a huge impact on people’s mental health.  This donation helps raise awareness and importance for the support we provide and ensures we are here for people when they need us the most.”

Amazon Development Centre Scotland has been based in Edinburgh since 2004 and is responsible for devising and growing innovations that bring new levels of choice and convenience to hundreds of millions of customers around the world. 

It houses teams of leading engineers, scientists, designers and product managers who work on everything from interactive user interface design to large-scale distributed systems and machine learning. The team is currently recruiting for a number of positions including software developers, engineers and applied scientists.

The donation was made as part of the ‘Amazon in the Community’ programme, whereby the company supports the communities around its operating locations across the UK.

Community donations are one of a number of ways in which Amazon is supporting communities across the UK during COVID-19. 

Throughout the pandemic Amazon has provided students with free online STEM resources and supported virtual classrooms with no-cost resources from AWS. The company has also teamed up with charity partner Magic Breakfast to deliver over 3 million healthy breakfasts to disadvantaged children around the UK.

For more information on how Amazon is supporting the UK during COVID-19, click here.

Coorie in for Christmas!

Please find attached a copy of our “Coorie in for Christmas” booklet  that we partnered with Health  in Mind to produce. 

Recognising that Christmas and New Year can be a difficult time of year and that we also face new challenges, unknowns and stresses over the festive period from coronavirus, we’ve focused on the Scottish concept of ‘coorie’ as a way to help us look after our mental health and wellbeing this winter. 

This booklet focuses on the things we can all do to look after our mental health and wellbeing in our homes, whilst also encouraging us to get outside and embrace the benefits of nature. It also includes a range of support and helpful contacts.

There is more information about mental health and support available all year round on iThrive Edinburgh and that online space will be kept up to with support available during the festive period and on Christmas Day in Edinburgh.

Please do share the booklet across your networks. 

With best wishes

Linda

Dr Linda Irvine Fitzpatrick

Strategic Programme Manager, NHS Lothian

CHARITIES AGAINST HATE

An update from HEALTH IN MIND

Following on from our July joint statement, we want to give an update on what we’ve been doing to address hate speech on social media:

Health in Mind is now an active member of The Third Sector Social Media Working Group (Charities Against Hate). The group has been created to review ethical social media and marketing practices and policies.

Charities and non-profits use social media for fundraising, relationship-building, raising awareness of key issues, supporting their services, providing vital and trusted information and more. We are working together to develop longer-term recommendations for real and meaningful changes to ensure these platforms do not support or provide a place for, online hate which causes real harm to real people.

As part of investigating potential platform changes, we are currently looking at: the experience for our beneficiaries, staff and volunteers on social media and their involvement in shaping this project; ethical partner policies for the sector and the impact on wider fundraising; existing data and information on the impact of hate speech on mental health; and ethical marketing practices for the sector.

Our power comes from working together. We aim to produce a collective proposal of clear and concise changes that will benefit the communities we serve at large, and to make recommendations to social media owners, policy makers and the wider public by the end of the year.

We’ll be sharing updates on our social media.

Please get in touch if you have any questions or would like to share your experience.

Email: laura.andre@health-in-mind.org.uk

https://lght.ly/56d5i8l

Derby Days: Edinburgh College students run football fundraiser for mental health charity

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Sainsburys cyclists go the extra mile for chosen charity

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Colleagues from Sainsburys Blackhall store recently took part in the BIG BIKE RIDE Challenge, cycling from Nairn to Blackhall and visiting Sainsburys stores on the way. Colleagues from Blackhall were taking part to raise money for our Local Charity of the Year – Health in Mind.

Three local boys from the Davidsons Mains Pipe Band gave their time to pipe the cyclists into store and the 170th Girl Guide company also gave their time to Bag pack for the charity.

Colleagues from Blackhall would like to thank everyone for their support and also the customers who donated.

We have raised a total of £1,700 for our charity, Health in Mind, so far.

Gail, Sainburys Blackhall

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Three shortlisted for Sainsbury’s Blackhall Charity of the Year

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It is the time of year again to choose the charity of the year for Sainsbury’s Blackhall! As valued customers and colleagues we would love for you to take part in this year’s vote for charity of the year (writes Gail Wilson). Continue reading Three shortlisted for Sainsbury’s Blackhall Charity of the Year