Wellbeing and mental health during Covid-19
This downloadable booklet has lots of advice for coping with stress and anxiety in yourself and in others. It has helpful telephone numbers and lots of useful tips.
Helping in the community
Our SVPs around the diocese have worked amazingly hard through lockdown, phoning hundreds of lonely people, delivering food parcels and medication and helping in lots of other practical ways. If you’d like to get involved in your local SVP, contact your parish priest, or see www.svp.org.uk for more information.
Many of our parishioners are over seventy, or with underlying health conditions, and may not be able to get back to face to face ministry for some time. At the same time we have many parishioners wanting to help. Our parish Call and Care scheme gives a simple structure for matching volunteers and vulnerable parishioners with safeguarding and GDPR built in. It has been developed with the SVP and with the help of the safeguarding and data management offices. Click here to find out more, and to download all the information, guidance and forms you need. CSAN have produced a Pandemic Planning Template for parishes to use: CSAN-SVP-Pandemic-planning-templateDownload
The Cinnamon Network has helpful tips for good ways to help the wider community: https://www.cinnamonnetwork.co.uk/connecting-with-your-community/. Many of our churches are centres for foodbank collection: see Trussell Trust for more information.
Safeguarding Advice
The Diocesan Safeguarding Office has just launched its new website, with resources, advice and helplines. You can also get information on some extremely helpful online training for safeguarding children and young people, and vulnerable adults, a must for anyone volunteering in these areas. https://northamptondiocese.org/safeguarding/
Mental health and dementia resources for parish groups
The “Welcome Me As I Am” has resources for churches and faith groups around dementia, mental health, resources for carers and suicide prevention. www.welcomemeasiam.org
Help for relationships
Is Your Relationship Under Stress During the Lock-down? Smartloving Breakthrough is there to help. A three- hour session to take simple steps to heal wounds and restore hope. Cost: £24 (financial help is available via mfinrcd@gmail.com). See https://smartloving.org/bto-uk. Private, confidential and effective.
Grieving and saying goodbye
Grieving is difficult at the best of times, but even more so at the moment. The website artofdyingwell.org has helpful pages on dealing with grief and saying goodbye in current circumstances.
The Liturgy Office has produced a service sheet that can be used for prayer when a funeral is happening for those that can’t attend: Prayers at the time of a funeral