We’re proud to share with you ‘We Will Swallow Our Words Back Down’, a report on the wellbeing views of Oxford’s new and emerging communities we co-produced with Healthwatch Oxfordshire and hundreds of community volunteers.
This report has been over a year in the making. Thank you to all the amazing people who participated in this project. It’s an honour and pleasure to work alongside you for better mental health provision in our communities!
Full report (summary below): https://tinyurl.com/OCAfullreport.
All our families also recently received a summary of the report in their food parcels.
Now that the report is finished, we can use it to continue to speak up and demand better mental health support for our communities. Our partners at Healthwatch Oxfordshirehave recently paid us some visits with a camera team to interview community members on their experiences with and thoughts on mental health support. We’ll use these interviews to further publicise the report and spread your ideas.
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Summary of report:
‘Between November 2019 and September 2020, Oxford Community Action, along with community
volunteers, worked collaboratively with Healthwatch Oxfordshire to understand what Oxford’s new and emerging communities think about wellbeing. Previous joint work had highlighted that mental health and wellbeing was a concern.
Together we took time to collaboratively plan the project and develop a way of working that built trust, understanding and open dialogue. We ran three focus groups and designed a questionnaire to reach out to Oxford’s new and emerging communities. 152 people responded to the questionnaire, along with many ongoing conversations. Respondents represented the diverse and multi-ethnic communities in Oxford. This report is the result of the work we did and what people told us.
This report shows that there is a huge appetite within the community to learn more about, gain skills and receive support to improve health and wellbeing. However, it also shows that there are significant barriers to getting the support that is needed.
The message is loud and clear – that to build access, trust and create culturally appropriate services – communities want to see support designed and delivered with their input, within community settings, and building on community networks.
Services need to actively engage and reach out to enable this to happen, in a continuous ongoing dialogue, and build relationships over time.’