Calm Connections: organisation supporting families with children’s mental health expands its community hub

An organisation helping families face and overcome challenges with children’s mental health in Greater Manchester has taken a major step forward after opening an expanded community hub.

Calm Connections recently unveiled its two-storey Family Wellbeing Centre in Stretford Mall in Trafford.

Previously the community interest company (CIC) had a room upstairs at the location but now has a two-storey building with a wellbeing space, a shop, rooms for therapy and training and a play area.

Calm Connections founder Emma Lenihan explained how she formed the organisation following her own family’s experiences with children’s mental health and how the expanded centre is a milestone in its bid to support as many youngsters and families in Trafford as possible.

What is the new Family Wellbeing Centre that Calm Connections has opened?

The new Family Wellbeing Centre at Stretford Mall covers two floors and has a shop, a family meeting room, a studio, a training room and a space for providing holistic therapy.

The organisation has also repurposed a play cafe that was previously in the upstairs space as a wellbeing and learning centre.

It is a major expansion for Calm Connections and a major development in its work.

Emma said: “We’ve recently had the sign put on which is making it clear we are here. It feels like our space now.

“For most of the time I’ve been working out of my kitchen and then we would hire rooms, which limited the support we could give.

“Now we’ve got a desk at the front in the wellbeing shop and a family room at the back, so parents can come in and there will be someone around to have a chat.

“We’ve also got more parents coming into the play area. It’s a really calm space and families can come in to do activities based on mindfulness with staff around to support them. We have quite a few parents with autistic children coming in because it’s not over-stimulating.

“We’ve had more than 100 people come through the doors in August which has been brilliant. It’s still building, a lot of people don’t know about us. Now they can see what we are and find out what we do.”

How did Emma found Calm Connections and what else does it do?

Emma founded Calm Connections based on her own lived experience of being a parent to a young person who experienced severe mental health problems and another who was affected by it.

She said: “I’ve always been passionate about supporting families so they don’t have to go through the same things we did.”

Emma felt there were notable gaps in service provision when she was looking for help with her own family, and so Calm Connections was born around four and a half years ago to try to plug some of them.

Calm Connections now runs parent and carers support groups and mentoring programmes which help them understand issues such as anxiety, trauma awareness and challenging behaviour.

The organisation also has a library of resources on a variety of topics which parents can browse through or borrow, while many of the volunteers also have lived experience of children’s mental health.

Emma has been interested for years in how relaxation techniques, mindfulness, yoga, massage and meditation can help children, having introduced many of them into her classrooms during her previous career as an early years’ teacher.

She also sits on a number of boards and has brought Calm Connections into partnership working with agencies and services which help children and families across Trafford.

In addition, she has been running an event called Reset for the past four years to bring local services together. This year’s edition falls on 30 September and Emma is hoping 30 different organisations will turn up.

Why does Emma continue to build Calm Connections and its work?

Emma says demand for help with mental health and wellbeing is rising and services such as the NHS and local authorities are simply unable to cope with the combination of rising demand and years of financial austerity affecting provision.

The other aim of the organisation is put the thoughts and ideas of those who are directly going through difficult times at the centre of how they are helped.

She said: “We know that children’s mental health and wellbeing is a real problem. There have been real difficulties, particularly for children aged 0 to 12, and demand is so high.

“My vision for what we do at the centre is to support families from the earliest stages, working on prevention and intervention all the way through to supporting families in crisis.

“I also sit on advisory boards as a parent voice because I’m passionate about listening to the voices of young people and their parents and getting everybody working together around that young person, coming from the same place to give the best support to that child.”