Building friendships and learning new skills – social activities for older and isolated people 2019-2021

Our thanks to the National Lottery Community Fund and National Lottery players everywhere for helping to fund our two year project. We are busy planning the activities for people with sight loss and will start in June in Redcar, Stockton, Middlesbrough, Hartlepool and Darlington. Follow our progress and see what our groups are getting up to on our Facebook page at GF Independence.

The project will enable us to develop our social activity offering for people isolated in their communities through sensory or physical impairments, mental ill-health and other long term conditions.
In line with our mission statement, our project is focused on having fun through meaningful activity and over the next 10 months we will be running monthly activity sessions in 5 borough areas in Teesside:

                                             Hartlepool

                                             Middlesbrough

                                             Stockton-on-Tees

                                             Darlington

                                             and Redcar and Cleveland

                                            Our Menu of Activities includes :-                               

                     Painting and drawing    :   Clay workshops- ceramics and modelling      :                   Collage          :              Glass painting      :           Embroidery, Knitting and Crochet       :         Fabric painting      :         Jewellery making    :      Mosaics    :    Greetings cards       :                  Art Appreciation    :      Quizzes    :     Board games

Sensing the Wild - connecting visually impaired people to nature

Our thanks to the National Lottery Heritage Fund and National Lottery players everywhere for helping us to fund our other exciting new project - taking people who are blind and visually impaired for walks using all the senses to experience nature.

Sensing the Wild will provide a programme of activities and events to help build the confidence and enjoyment of blind and visually impaired people in entering the natural world. Four Visually Impaired groups from across the Tees Valley region will be supported to visit their local green spaces and wildlife, connecting them with nature, as well as with other blind and partially sighted people and groups of people who are active in managing wild green spaces.

The project will focus on four Tees Valley wild green spaces, together with the active volunteer Friends Groups supporting these spaces, to build lasting relationships between them and visually impaired people and the nature in their local environment. Friends groups will be given training to support visits from visually impaired people, helping to remove barriers for those with a visual impairment.

We will be sharing our group pictures and updates here as the project gets going!