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Residents
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Therapeutic Horticulture
Gardening, greenwood working and forging workshops for young people living in our supported housing, and local community groups.
In our Therapeutic Horticulture project, young people and the wider community can plant crops and flowers, nurture green spaces and engage in the slow and mindful craft of greenwood working.
Our outdoor spaces are places to be physically active, learn new skills, bring worries and frustrations, connect with others and positively plan for the future.
Contact Sam
You can contact Sam, the manager of our Therapeutic Horticulture project here.
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Nurturing and tending to an allotment is an extremely social and therapeutic process.
At YMCA Exeter, we are curating spaces to grow and make. This is often a communal process but has huge individual benefits.
Our gardens provide young people with the mental space to reflect and learn about themselves, build a peer-based supportive and positive community, and greatly improve their physical health, general wellbeing and mental health. We find that young people are much more likely to open up about themselves when working alongside their mentor and peers in this way, rather than in a formal desk-based mentoring session.
Growing for Good
Our horticulture and wellbeing project, ‘Growing For Good’ involves seasonally nurturing vegetables and flowers in our community garden. There is well-established evidence that indicates that this approach can address the challenges of anxiety through improving physical health and general wellbeing and this will be the basis of our group discussions. This group is for young people in our supported housing.
Wellbeing
Forging Futures
Our blacksmithing and anger management project ‘Forging Futures’ is for young people living in our supported housing projects.
We have recently bought a small forge where we train our residents in the basic principles of blacksmithing. Participants get the chance to make their own small projects – key rings, kitchen utensils and metal tools they can use in their whittling and green woodworking. This empowers the residents with the knowledge and the skills to forge their own futures, quite literally! And there is nothing like banging a piece of metal to work out your anger, so we will use this ‘hook’ to integrate our blacksmithing activities with group discussion around Anger and behavioural challenges.
Whittling for Wellbeing
This project for young people living in our supported housing involves learning greenwood working skills like pole lathe tuition, chair making and bowl turning. We believe the immersive nature of this activity will enable residents to work through Low Moods they are experiencing.
Working with green, freshly cut, unseasoned wood outdoors – the traditional way – is a slow, creative, and connected way to make things. Using your hands to create and nurture has so many positive health benefits, both physical and mental.
