Local Surrey mental health charity, Mary Frances Trust, celebrates 30 years of supporting their community.
If you haven’t heard of Mary Frances Trust (we call ourselves MFT) then here’s a bit about us. We’re a mental health and emotional wellbeing charity in Surrey and were founded in Leatherhead in 1994 by Mary (Edwards) and Frances (Jones) to work alongside people who used mental health services, to enable them to achieve their own particular goals and aspirations. This year we are proud to be celebrating 30 years of ongoing support, service development and initiating change within the mental health landscape.
The type of work we do today is slightly different from our early days, but the principles and objects are the same – working side by side with clients and staff. Our support now reaches across Surrey, as well as online, and anyone aged 16+ with a Surrey GP can self-refer to access free support (with no waiting lists).
The range of services we offer includes a whole host of self-help groups and classes, peer support groups (a safe space where experiences and strategies for coping are shared) – this includes young people peer support, men’s peer support, LGBTQ+ peer support and autism peer support; individual support with debt, benefits and employment; we run a Safe Haven which is open every evening of the year (both face to face and virtually) for anyone in mental health crisis; we run a Safe Harbour which is open during the working week and is for clients who need more 1-2-1 crisis support in the day; we work with over 30 Surrey GP surgeries as part of our GPimhs service (General Practice Integrated Mental Health Service) where we employ community practitioners to support patients with mental health issues; we have our Service User Network (SUN) which we run in partnership with Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Trust (SABP) and is a daily community-based peer support group with lifetime membership for clients with complex emotions, often associated with personality disorder; we run a service called Recovery & Connect which encourages clients to rely less on crisis services and use other community-based support instead; we have a specific Financial and Wellbeing Support Service, run in partnership with Citizens Advice Epsom & Ewell, where we support clients who are experiencing both poor mental health and extreme difficulties with their financial situation.
We also have a football group – actually we have our own team, The East Surrey Eagles. They train twice a week and they have league matches every month – they take part in the Surrey FA Mental Health League. When the leisure centre where they train doubled the venue hire costs, one of our clients who attends our football training wrote a letter to the new centre owners to explain just what going to football means to him & the rest of team:
“I have played with the MFT team for a year now, and it has been a profoundly life improving experience.
The MFT team has given me and all our players a lifeboat that just doesn’t sink. A constant, dependable lifting of spirits that gives us momentum to manage and improve other areas of our lives.
I’ve come in every week for a year and played football with my teammates who’s mental health diagnoses include schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, OCD, as well as players with autism and dementia.
There is a huge range of ability on the pitch, and for many of our players it will be the only exercise and social contact they will take part in all week. The football has changed all of our lives for the better.”
The extract from this letter illustrates just how powerful something like football can be to our clients. You’ll be pleased to read that this client has recently become a volunteer football coach for the team, and the venue did slightly reduce the hire cost!
Mary Frances Trust 30 Years
From our inception, we have been working alongside people with mental health issues – to ensure their voice is heard, to design and shape services with them, and to meet their needs. We set up our Advisory Group in 2017 – this is a group of volunteers who have experience of using mental health services and who work together to co-design everything that happens here at our charity. We now employ Lived Experience Practitioners (LexPs) – these are community-based peer support workers who draw on their own personal experience and recovery journey as a tool to support others. Their experience allows them to understand people in an empathetic way that supports their own personal recovery, and we are proud to employ them. This way of working, now known as co-production, is core to what we do at MFT and is a key part of our strategy.
We are funded by Surrey County Council and the NHS, however our budgets are often stretched and we do not receive funding for our co-production work, which we know is important in offering a relevant and relatable service to our clients. Therefore we rely on other funding sources to help us in our mission to always support our community with their mental wellbeing. With that in mind, we invite our local business community to support us in whatever way you can, so whether you’d like to choose us to be your Charity of the Year as part of your corporate social responsibility, or perhaps you have a team of employees who’d like to run a half or full marathon for MFT, then we’d love to hear from you. As a thank you for any support you offer us, and as part of our commitment to ending the stigma surrounding mental health (we are part of the End Stigma Surrey campaign) we can offer you some free training for your staff about stigma and mental health, and we’d be delighted to set this up for you.
Like many services which are available to us, unless you or a family member or a friend have used them, you may not be aware of them. For many of our clients, our services can be lifelines. What we can achieve together is fantastic, and we are looking forward to the next 30 years of being there for Surrey. Here’s a testimonial from one of our clients;
“I can 100% say that being part of MFT has enabled me to now believe that I am able to rebuild my life and who I am, in a way I never thought possible”.
You can find out more about MFT by visiting our website www.maryfrancestrust.org.uk and if you are interested in supporting MFT then please contact Biba, our fundraising officer on biba@maryfrancestrust.org.uk
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