VOTING ENDS AT MIDNIGHT!
Well here it is – the final update.
Unsurprisingly it’s been the busiest week of the campaign. It’s also been the wettest. Volunteers braved the downpours and over 500 people voted for APP at the Sheldon Countryside Festival, where the team also received support from the Lord Mayor of Birmingham. 130 people voted at Sacred Heart and Holy Souls church and families also voted at holiday events organised by the Pavilion Church at Bournville and at indoor play centres Tiny Terrorz and Funatticz.
Thanks to the tremendous efforts of our members we have had media coverage in the Londonist, the Yorkshire Post, the Birmingham Mail, and articles in the Exeter Express and Echo and the Sidmouth Herald (repeated in the Midweek Herald).
Social media has been remarkable. Just in the past week (to yesterday) our content has reached over 1.07 million individual Twitter accounts, with 2.7 million impressions (the total number of tweets that have appeared). The figures for the week before were 320k accounts and 642k impressions. The most retweeted was a tweet from the NSPCC and we’ve had more help from Denise Welch as well as tweets from Britmums and lots of Twitter activity around the Londonist piece.
Voting is open until midnight. Remember that everyone in your household can vote with their own email address or phone number.
We have done our very best and, win or lose, have made a massive step forward in raising awareness. When voting has finished and we’ve all had a chance to have a sit down and/or a meal without a laptop, phone, voting forms or leaflets in hand, we will be getting together to have a look over all that has been achieved in the past five weeks. Our task then will be to work out how best to build on the incredible work everyone has done. Thank you all.
In June 2015 my sister-in-law joined me in a 10 mile charity walk through the Kent countryside. It was an exhausting but rewarding day, with the added bonus of plenty of sunshine and beautiful views. I selected APP as my chosen charity as the work they do for women and their families is so important. When I suffered postpartum psychosis myself 11 years ago there was very little user-friendly reliable information, and no access to peer support. It was a lonely and terrifying place to be, and the stigma surrounding mental illness really hindered me in properly engaging in the treatment and support that I was offered. I count myself very lucky to have achieved a good recovery. The information produced by APP, their anti-stigma work and online peer support forum provides amazing support for women who experience this distressing and dangerous illness. I hope that the £180 I raised will be a really worthwhile contribution to their work.
Artists Julia Vaughan and Li Appleby proved superb in leading our art workshop. They sensitively gave everyone expert guidance, quickly gained the trust of participants, and clearly understood what was needed to enable women to interpret their experiences of PP in graphic forms. Julia shared with the group some of her own beautiful images around the theme of harbour, which then inspired one of the activities carried out on the Saturday. Li shared her expertise in lino cutting. This was a really exciting and uplifting activity and lead to some great prints being produced.
The first group activity we undertook was called 'My Island'. It was collaborative piece in which the participants added images and motifs using a wide mix of media to a very large, roughly drawn out, generic island. The images were intended to be reminiscent of happy times with our families and each participant was moved around the large table at approximately five or ten minute intervals to work on a different area--either adding a new imaginative element (boats, fish and chip shops, piers) or modifying someone else's work. This exercise is apparently more usually used for icebreaking or team-building but it was noted that, even before this first official session as a group, we had already bonded to such a degree as to make that part of the original intention somewhat superfluous! Rather than restricting ourselves to drawing and painting our way politely around a narrow coastal strip, which is apparently how these things normally go, I have distinct memories of participants climbing onto the table so as to add inland forests, mountain ranges and ski-jumps!
Jo, who is an enthusiastic supporter of APP, is running the Worthing 10K in June and raising funds for APP.