Recently celebrating its third birthday, the Kindness and Wellbeing Group has received awards for its exceptional mental health support work and has recently been featured on live TV. In honour of Mental Health Awareness Week, the group came together wearing green to show solidarity and raise awareness. They enjoyed a vibrant green-themed buffet, complete with homemade cakes decorated with positive messages like “Mental Health Matters” and “You Are Loved.”
Founder of the Kindness Community, Laura Hope Cordell, continues to prove that small, heartfelt gestures can have a huge impact. The Kindness and Wellbeing group meets every Tuesday at St Edmunds Church to get support, be creative and natter over a cuppa. For Mental Health Awareness Week, members volunteered to assemble mental health packs to be sent worldwide. Over 500 of these have been sent in the past year alone. These are offered on their website, completely free, paid for by their fundraising. With costs and demand for support constantly rising, fundraising is more important than ever.
That fundraising includes events like the Online Market for Kindness Community which brings together small businesses, many of which are run by entrepreneurs who struggle with their own physical or mental health. The current event runs throughout May and has nearly 200 talented stallholders and over 5700 customers in the pop-up group on Facebook.
In addition to work in the online and in-person groups, Laura has teamed up with author and mental health advocate Nikki Mattocks to produce a book called ‘Unmasking the Truth: The Lies we Tell Ourselves’. This book is powerful new collection of essays sharing honest, deeply personal stories of people navigating stigma, trauma, and self-doubt. In it, Kindness Community founder, Laura, shares her story of how she’s used her own traumatic experiences as fuel to create the Kindness Community and bring people together, so they are not alone in their struggles. The book encourages readers to challenge internalised shame and embrace themselves with compassion.
A key part of this collaboration is its support for Kindness Community CIC £1 from every book sold will go directly to the Kindness Community to ensure they can continue their award-winning support, not just in Dartford, but around the world.
Learn more about everything Kindness Community CIC does here: tinyurl.com/kindnesscommunity
Order Unmasking the Truth on Amazon
