Kizzy Minter, 23, is the Lead Transitions Worker for Teamwork Trust and spends much of her week at the charity’s Wellingborough site, where she specialises in mental health. Kizzy supports more than 40 service users a week with independent living skills - delivering educational and activity-based sessions and monitoring the tailored progression of each individual. Kizzy also provides training to staff across all three sites, to ensure they can support all service users with mental health challenges. 

Mental health awareness is vital…

To everyone at all three of our sites. It is a topic that I consistently train our staff in, for the benefit of the service users. I ensure all sites are delivering sessions around mental health, including managing stress, and helping service users manage their emotions in healthy ways. I signpost changes in the law, ensuring we stay up to date with legislation and am often updating our services to help individuals get the best level of care.

All Teamwork Trust centres run a week-long activity-based programme each year in May for Mental Health Awareness Week on managing your mental health. We conduct mindful colouring, meditation, mindfulness and relaxation sessions. The staff get involved with the sessions, and also undertake mandatory training about mental health management. I provide optional extra training for staff members if they want to become more knowledgeable in this specialism or if they have a service user who may need additional support.

My qualifications enhance my work…

By helping to support everyone – service users, staff and myself. I have undertaken many mental health qualifications on topics including self-harm, suicide, anxiety management and wellbeing training. Outside of Teamwork Trust, I led a Northamptonshire campaign called ‘Time to Change’, which aimed to reduce stigma around mental health, and consisted of lots of different training sessions, and offered individuals in the community mental health days off work for appointments.

Through my own lived experience of mental health, and my numerous qualifications and training, I work closely with individuals and groups to find creative ways to support their wellbeing.

One project I run is ‘Road to Fitness’. Sports is a great way to release feel-good hormones, and we promote good physical health in addition to good mental health. Each service user gets a stamp every time they exercise, and they move up the notice board ‘road’ on their journey of fitness.

My day-to-day tasks can include…

Supporting a new service user who has started, having those initial evaluative meetings to see how the charity can best support them and what goals they want to achieve. I’m in charge of making their transition as easy as possible so they feel included.

Other activities include helping service users fill out their gratitude journal, where we look at things they found positive that day, and they focus on writing down their reflections and emotions – what went well, what didn’t go so well and how they feel they could have a better day tomorrow.

 

 

One service user who stands out for me…

Is a lady who hadn’t had any group social interaction since he went to college. The pandemic had also impacted her social skills and had a detrimental impact on her mental health. Before coming to Teamwork Trust, she’d already decided she wasn’t going to like it, and she felt negatively towards staff and the activities we provided. I worked one to one with this person, finding out what she wanted from our services, setting small goals and finding out what went wrong or what she enjoyed at the end of each day.

Soon, she was setting her own goals and started achieving them. She started to notice positive things rather than focusing on the negatives, she made friends, started speaking to more people and being more open to games and craft activities we provided. Her transformation has been amazing, and she is now curious about people and approaches them first to ask them questions. It’s exciting and rewarding to be a small part of this.

 We run a travel training course at Teamwork Trust …

Which is all about empowering our service users to travel safely in their communities. We explore the safest ways of travelling in the community, with service users taking note of how busy roads can be and how much traffic there is, as well as being able to identify safe crossings. The course then moves on to helping people learn to plan journeys, using bus timetables and smartphone apps. We encourage people to use bus passes or cash to buy tickets on a bus, empower our service users to know where and when to get off the bus – and so much more.

Outside of work…

I am a big arts and craft fan, and recently I have been making decoupage bottles. It’s where you wrap bottles in paper and napkin crafts to make objects, and I find it relaxing and therapeutic for my mental health.

 

·       Promoting independence reduces loneliness and improves mental health, so if you are a parent, carer or support worker, please think about Teamwork Trust when thinking about their future. Click to Get in touch 

Our 3 Centre Leads Sam, Olly & Kizzy