Making New Connections for Mental Wellbeing in Oxfordshire?

For the last year, we have been hosting an Impact Network on recovery-based approaches to mental health. The network consisted of people with lived experience of mental distress as well as staff and volunteers from statutory and voluntary organisations, and met four times over a six-month period. During this time we discussed the many issues facing local people experiencing mental distress, and considered how the idea of ‘recovery’ could be useful in improving things. In our last meeting in May 2025, we agreed to see if there was wider interest in developing a recovery network in our area.

In our meetings we agreed a ‘mission statement’ for what the network would do. If you’re interested in more detail, you can read it here.

The Community Works building in Oxford city centre
For this project, we’ve been using low-cost meeting spaces created by Makespace Oxfordshire

Recovery approaches to mental health have been developed by people experiencing mental distress, rather than experts or clinicians. We think they are generally easier to understand than more complex medical or psychological terms, and so provide a common language everyone can use. While approaches vary, five values are commonly present:

  1. Connectedness: being positively connected to other people.
  2. Hope: belief that recovery is possible.
  3. Identity: overcoming stigma to achieve a positive sense of identity.
  4. Meaning: living a meaningful life.
  5. Empowerment: having the resources to take control over your own life.

Together these are often known as the CHIME framework. Through the network, we hope to develop more links between:

  • people applying the principles of recovery in their own lives
  • those working in local mental health services, and
  • the wider group of organisations and groups providing community support.

The network would run itself, developing its own ideas for what to do. The initial focus would include networking, training and sharing issues. We are keen to include the wide range of organisations that do not see themselves as mental health services but provide support to all sections of our community, such as community larders, warm spaces, exercise groups and so on.

Impact: IMProving Adult Care TogetherThis project was made possible by support from IMPACT – the UK centre for Improving Adult Care Together