Your planet doctors/ Abri housing association neighbourhood “ grow your own” pilot project
February 16, 2021Bournemouth University Collaboration
February 17, 2021
Funded by the European Regional Development Fund, ASPIRE is due to begin in April 2021 in Boscombe, Dorset, as part of a food related community project. It intends to work with other community projects to produce a passport of activities for local residents who are struggling with their weight and employment challenges, providing them with access to local healthy food with an opportunity for them to adopt a healthy lifestyle and the ability to develop job skills. A new building in Churchill gardens will become the hub for the project.
Dr Anne Hayden is a mindfulness practitioner and completed a foundation course in Mindfulness teaching at Oxford University. She has studied in depth how mindfulness, with particular reference to food growing in small groups, transforms the brain. She has given numerous successful presentations on similar subjects both to GPs and the general public. She plans to provide some of the mental health support for the ASPIRE project in the form of a simple and easy to understand presentation on “How Growing Your Own Makes You Happier”, based on the Neuroscience of Mindfulness. Attendees will learn how to deliver this presentation themselves in order to reach a wider audience and to boost their own self-belief. In this way they may better understand how beneficial this whole process is to improvement of self-esteem, confidence, self-worth and levels of happiness, as well as boosting immunity and providing protection against many life-threatening diseases, particularly prevalent in those who are overweight and stressed. Many GPs are now prescribing growing and other green activities, and evidence suggests that this can be as effective at treating anxiety and depression as medication, and sometimes more so.
https://theconversation.com/anxiety-and-depression-why-doctors-are-prescribing-gardening-rather-than-drugs-121841