Kicking off - 14 November 2012

This is the first post of the Health, Wealth and Happiness blog. For those of you who don’t know, Health, Wealth and Happiness is an 18-month project funded by the Big Lottery Fund and The Daily Mail: Silver Dreams. The project will be supporting the financial, emotional and physical wellbeing of over 50s living with HIV in London.

Everything has been ticking along at the Health, Wealth and Happiness project since we began on 1 October. I’m very happy to say that things have been progressing really well. We began our service delivery on day one of the project, with our financial caseworker seeing clients from the get go. Mentoring was set up and ready shortly afterwards, but it took a little bit more time to get our groupwork off the ground. We’re now, however, mid-way through our first ‘Ageing Positively’ group for gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) and it seems to be going very well.

One of the things that has been most impressive about the service is how well integrated our client group has become. In general, people are interested in at least two of the current project streams and are happy to engage. As one of our steering group members put it: ‘It’s nice to work on a project that is so needed.’ Indeed. So far we’ve had over 25 clients, and we’ve recruited 10 volunteers.

We’ve also finished recruiting to our steering group which is meeting for the first time early next month, just after World AIDS Day. We’re incredibly fortunate to have a great mix of service users and individuals working in the sector and almost everybody is over 50. The steering group will be responsible for much of the development of our workshops and will be influential in the design of our Best Practice Toolkit for mainstream social care organisations.

Anyway, that’s all for now! We’ll use this blog to keep you updated from time to time about what we’ve been up to.

Charlie and the Health, Wealth and Happiness project team.