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📢 Support Group Break (Sept 25 - Oct 1)

TheMix

Alt text: black woodland creature lying in tent with blankets, fairy lights, and a book.

If you don't know what a Support Group break is, click the spoiler below. ⤵

What is a Support Group break?
Roughly three times a year, we have a week (or two) where we take a break from running group chats.

These breaks allow staff, volunteers, and you guys to take a breather. If you use Support Groups often, breaks are a good opportunity to try new services and expand your support network.

When we can, we also use these periods to review community feedback, reflect on how things are going in the community, and look what we might want to work on next.

When are they?
Typically, there is a break around January, May, and September. We have had one more break than usual this year due to resourcing at The Mix.

When is the next break?
The next break will be from Monday 25th September - Sunday 1st October. The usual Support Group schedule will resume as normal on Monday 16th.

A lot of you know the staff team has been working on internal capacity and resources, and that will continue to be our focus during this chat break.

Will there be a community quiz?
Naturally! Look out for a dedicated announcement for this. Trivia nerds, be ready.

Where can I go instead?
If you'd like some quick, live support while Support Groups aren't running, feel free to head over to our one-to-one services. You can get in touch in three ways - phone, webchat and email. Call for free on 0808 808 4994, from 3pm-midnight. The boards will also be open as normal.

If you're at breaking point, our Crisis Messenger is also open as usual. Text THEMIX to 85258. You can also head to this thread to find more crisis options if you need urgent support.

If you want somewhere like General Chat, check out:

Questions? Drop them below

Alt text: dog sleeping in hammock, swaying back and forth with its nose over the edge.

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Millie2787

Will Staffing for YCC be looked at and whether it just needs to be cancelled for the foreseeable until staffing can hopefully be working around, during that break ? Sure you can imagine it being cancelled 4 weeks in a row sometimes with little notice is beginning to get frustrating

JustV

Appreciate the question @Millie2787, and your honesty. We'd be surprised if you didn't feel frustrated at the closures - support spaces being unavailable is never a nice thing.

Something we will do for the foreseeable future is, when there's a decision between closing Young Carer's Chat or General Chat due to mod cover, Young Carers Chat will be given priority. Unless something disastrous happens, that means YCC should stay open every week.

We're also looking at ways to make Young Carer's Chat more suitable to the unpredictable schedules of young carers. Previously, we've said we'll close any Support Group that has only one person in it for more than 20 mins. Reflecting, we realised that isn't super accessible because keeping that time (or any time) free is an added challenge for young carers.

That's a slightly more detailed announcement that will be coming separately, but I wanted to mention it here so you know it's something we're thinking about.

I will say that, if for any reason we're not confident we can keep YCC open consistently, we'll look at closing it pre-emptively so we don't get people's hopes up and then let them down on the day. We don't think we'll need to do that now, but we realise closing with late notice brings its own stress, and that closing in advance is easier for everyone if we need to do that.

Appreciate you being patient while we're working out these issues, and feel free to post any follow up questions or what have you.

Redemption

JustV wrote: »

Alt text: black woodland creature lying in tent with blankets, fairy lights, and a book.

If you don't know what a Support Group break is, click the spoiler below. ⤵
What is a Support Group break?
Roughly three times a year, we have a week (or two) where we take a break from running group chats.

These breaks allow staff, volunteers, and you guys to take a breather. If you use Support Groups often, breaks are a good opportunity to try new services and expand your support network.

When we can, we also use these periods to review community feedback, reflect on how things are going in the community, and look what we might want to work on next.

When are they?
Typically, there is a break around January, May, and September. We have had one more break than usual this year due to resourcing at The Mix.

When is the next break?
The next break will be from Monday 25th September - Sunday 1st October. The usual Support Group schedule will resume as normal on Monday 16th.

A lot of you know the staff team has been working on internal capacity and resources, and that will continue to be our focus during this chat break.

Will there be a community quiz?
Naturally! Look out for a dedicated announcement for this. Trivia nerds, be ready.

Where can I go instead?
If you'd like some quick, live support while Support Groups aren't running, feel free to head over to our one-to-one services. You can get in touch in three ways - phone, webchat and email. Call for free on 0808 808 4994, from 3pm-midnight. The boards will also be open as normal.

If you're at breaking point, our Crisis Messenger is also open as usual. Text THEMIX to 85258. You can also head to this thread to find more crisis options if you need urgent support.

If you want somewhere like General Chat, check out:
General Chat forum

Chit Chat thread

Positivity Corner

Questions? Drop them below

Alt text: dog sleeping in hammock, swaying back and forth with its nose over the edge.

I was thinking when the next chat break will be as we've not had one for a while. I was just on the chat, I was saying I think even though it might suck not having the chat on. I was saying it can have advantages too like reducing screen time, reducing the likelihood of being reliant on the chats, maybe helping finding other stuff to do offline aside from the community as it is a good platform but it can be unhealthy being online, 1 hour and half could be a good amount of time to reduce online. Even though its optional to come on or not its tempting just to come on as well but when it's not its easier to get them benefits I've mentioned above. I think the chats not being on on weekends are very helpful in terms of the reasons above too. I think like personal chat breaks are not ideal though as it can make you feel left out, discriminated etc but normal proper chat breaks and them not being on the weekend can be very very beneficial.

I definitely still enjoy the chats though and it's good to hear that they might be returning to 7 days a week too. I just thought I'd give some thoughts on it and maybe a suggestion to maybe do chat breaks monthly, maybe the start or end of every month, I don't know if it's the right place but I couldn't find the feedback forum to put it on.

JustV

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this @FordRanger.

This is an okay place to share feedback, though the form is here if you ever want it in the furure.

You're not the first to say this actually - that chat breaks feel healthy and give people a chance to change up their routines, also for weekends. There can be value in that for sure.

It does seem to vary person-to-person though, and for that reason I think we'd be reluctant to have breaks more frequent than we have them now (three times a year). Consistency is also quite important for a service like ours, and we want to make sure people can rely on Support Groups running. This also ties into The Mix's wider organisational goals about our services reaching as many people as possible. Having more Support Group breaks might interfere with that.

So I suppose we'd lean more towards encouraging people to reflect on their own personal use of Support Groups (and The Mix more broadly) and taking breaks when they want to.

All that said, talking about how to use Support Groups in a 'healthy' way may still be important. I know this topic comes up every now and again but I'm not sure we've ever had any proper discussions about it. @FordRanger if you'd ike to share some of your thoughts in a separate post for people to discuss you're more than welcome to - might be a worthwhile convo.