This year, our students completing the NSS have raised a huge £1,464 for our chosen charity.
Teaming up with other ARU campuses, we worked with you and the Students' Union to choose charities for each of our campuses to donate to.
Each charity will be receiving £1,464, with a total of £5,856 being donated in total across Anglia Ruskin universities. This year you chose:
ARU London: Mind in Camden
Cambridge: Cambridge Rape Crisis
Chelmsford: The Royal British Legion | Armed Forces Charity
Peterborough: Wilderness Foundation | Transforming lives through nature
Mind in Camden would like to thank all students for participating to raise funds for their recipients, alongside our partnering university charity partners. Here is what Mind in Camden have said about how your donations will be going further to help those in need of support and uplifting:
All our work is with local people who have had, or are having, difficult experiences that have affected their mental health, and we work alongside them. We will be delighted to use the donation to support our services:
Our services include a wellbeing and recovery service; hearing voices projects for young people, people in prison, refugees and asylum seekers in immigration removal centres; social prescribing projects; a Healthy Minds initiative that supports people to reconnect with community activities and a cultural advocacy project.
The pandemic and its lockdowns and restrictions have pushed already vulnerable people more deeply into isolation, and we have been working to support people by phone, on the doorstep and by delivering meals. We are doing what we can to make the lifting of the lockdown easier for people here in a socially distanced way, and look forward to a time when we can open the doors of our building again as routine and not a carefully planned operation.
How Peterborough is supporting Wilderness Foundation:
After the initial lockdown in 2020, we were able to offer online therapy and phone support and were one of the first nature therapy facilitators in the UK to be able to return to work in July 2020 and continue our outreach programmes, including Out There Academy, TurnAround and Brave Futures as well as our education programme Chatham Green Project.
This year we will continue to develop our outreach programmes which help increase self-esteem, support better mental wellbeing, build resilience and help prevent young people who are vulnerable to exploitation, from ending up in the criminal system.
Your kind donation plays an important part in the foundation’s mission in supporting young people with mental health problems and complex lives. We build connections with wild nature and help young people build resilience coping strategies and help with re-engagement in education as well as important conservation work. The money you have helped raise will provide support such as face to face therapy and online support for those most in need who are still experiencing issues affecting their mental wellbeing such as trauma, anxiety and depression or social isolation due to the pandemic.
How Chelmsford is supporting The Royal British Legion:
Donations to the Royal British Legion help those in need within the Armed Forces community; serving and ex-personnel and their families. The Royal British Legion provides vital support, helping veterans and their families in debt and emergency situations.
How Cambridge is supporting their charity Cambridge Rape Crisis:
The money raised will help us to empower even more women and girls impacted by the traumas of sexual violence in their recovery. Your support helps us to provide our free specialist support services, which includes emotional, therapeutic and advocacy support. This is especially important at the moment when we are seeing extremely high need and demand for our services post lockdown. Our counselling service alone has received the highest number of referrals we’ve ever seen.
Here are some examples of how the money you’ve raised supports local women and girls:
- £5 can buy a self-care bag to help and support survivors through giving evidence in court.
- £10 could pay for modelling dough, clay and stickers for a girl’s play therapy session.
- £15 could contribute to travel or childcare costs so a woman can attend support appointments.
- £50 can give a woman or girl one specialist counselling session.
- £64 could cover the cost of recruiting one volunteer for our emotional support services.
- £428 could enable us to train one volunteer for our emotional support services.
As always, we strive to support our communities and push progress across all platforms for students and staff. If you have any wellbeing concerns related or non-related to this subject, please email studentwellbeing@london.aru.ac.uk.
If you know of any local charities you believe would benefit from our support at ARU London, please let us know about them by emailing enquiries@london.aru.ac.uk