Whats the campaign all about?...

What’s your Goal? What’s the campaign all about?

Our 2012 What’s your Goal? campaign is all about reducing mental health stigma by getting people talking. We’re continually searching for ways to make our member* recruitment meaningful by influencing attitudes and behaviours of people we come in contact with. We hope that by getting people talking, we will improve the experience and outcomes of people using our services, by making Leeds a better place to live. It’s really that simple.

By having an annual campaign, we hope to find fresh ways to get people thinking, talking and coming together. What’s your Goal? is inspired by the Olympic and Paralympic Games – we know everyone’s going to be talking about them and we want help people make the connections between setting aspirations/goals and sporting achievement with positive mental health and wellbeing.

So what ideas underpin our campaign? There’s quite a bit of evidence that setting goals is good for our wellbeing. Writing down a goal means we’re much more likely to achieve it. Achieving a goal is good for our self-esteem. Looking after our physical health is good for our mental health. Exercise has positive benefits for people experiencing mental distress. Lastly, coming together to work towards a common goal is good for all of us.

We hope to raise awareness by sharing information, stories and directing people to local resources. We’ll be organising and participating in lots of events throughout the year where we’ll encourage people to set a personal goal. We’ll be asking people to represent their goal on a piece of bunting. We’ll then connect all the individual bunting-goals into one enormous (hopefully!) record-breaking piece of bunting. We love the idea that each individual goal will be an integral part of an overall goal – bringing lots of different people at different events together for a common purpose – in this way we want to hit the wellbeing jackpot! And we hope to recruit some members along the way, so we can keep you in touch with our campaigns and increase the influence of local people in the future direction of our NHS Trust.

The campaign is organised by our communication and engagement team. We’re so keen that we’re all setting goals for ourselves to raise money for physical exercise equipment for people who use our services. We’ll be doing this through a sponsored run, zumbathon, football tournament, sponsored walks and cycle. Who knows what else we’ll cook up during the year. If you want to get involved then we’d love to hear from you.

Keith Woodhouse (one of our non-executive directors) has set himself a massive goal to undertake a sponsored climb up the highest mountain in the Americas. You can find his blog here and his just giving page here We’re massively grateful for his support.

If you’d like to get involved, or find out more, then please do get in touch. You can reach our team on ftmembership.lpft@nhs.net

Watch this space for more blogs from the team throughout the year.

Victoria

*As a Foundation Trust, we are part of the NHS as well as being a public benefit corporation. This means that people can become members of our organisation who are eligible to stand to be a governor and/or vote for who becomes a governor. Governors have an important role in setting the future direction of our organisation and are made up of people who use our services, care for people who use our services, staff and the general public with an interest in our Trust.