What is the Standing Together Cymru project?
Standing Together Cymru is a three-year Big Lottery-funded project working in partnership with four housing associations (United Welsh, Derwen Cymru, Newport City Homes and Melin Homes) across South East Wales.
The project will establish 30 weekly peer support groups in retirement and extra care housing schemes. We will be running the groups for six months. The groups aim to deepen social connections and improve well-being.
Standing Together Cymru is part of the work we do in our Programmes department on co-production. Co-production makes sure our participants have an active voice when it comes to the activities they take part in and the support they receive. We run peer group initiatives with different groups of people across the life course. Standing Together Cymru was born from the Standing Together London project.
Standing Together Cymru groups
The Standing Together Cymru team have been facilitating groups since early February. Our group facilitators start each group with a 'getting to know each other' activity which leads to discussions on other topics and interests. We then design the subsequent sessions around the themes that the group bring up. This is just one example of how important it is for the groups to belong to the participants, rather than the people who run the group (facilitators).