Northwich Men's Mental Health & Fitness

The idea

Directions For Men has been supporting Men in Northwich since July 2021. We are now ready to grow and expand our support and are working closely with Brio Leisure to make it happen.

Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 49. Quite often this is because of societal pressure on men which tells them they should not ask for help of they're struggling, should be self sufficient, should not show emotion or make themselves vulnerable. Pressures which kills 12 men every single day in the UK.

Directions For Men provide specific spaces for men to come and talk about the problems they are facing with other men who understand their experience, can support them through those troubles.

In addition to our talk sessions this project will deliver weekly men's fitness sessions delivered by qualified and trained staff from Brio Leisure using Brio facilities at Northwich Memorial Court.

These activities will promote better mental health and fitness and prevent suicide.

What we'll deliver

One Peer support session per week.

One Fitness session Per week

Why it's a great idea

Directions For Men will provide spaces for men to talk about their struggles with other men who will listen, empathise and understand them. The benefits this will bring are:-

Reduce Loneliness and isolation.
Improve mental health
Reduce male suicide
Encourage men to seek help from appropriate mental health services.

We will also provide opportunities for men to experience health and fitness classes supported by qualified staff at Brio Leisure and using their facilities. These sessions will:-

Improve mental fitness amongst Men.
Reduce Male suicide.
Increase physical activity amongst men
Improve physical health and fitness

Steps to get it done

Commence first talking group in Northwich Memorial Court.

Commence first physical activity session in Northwich Memorial Court

Location

By Directions For Men CiC

It’s always been a bit of a joke about men. ... Learn More

About

The funding from CWaC has made a huge difference to us this year. Organisationally we have used separate funding to recruit one of our previous group participants as a group development lead which has had a profound impact on the reach we have to reach out to men who need our groups and this has, in turn had a really positive impact on attendance at our groups. So far this year we have had 1802 attendances at our groups. At Northwich our groups have increased from 3 or 4 per week to 8 per week and we have seen 33 individual men from the town. We now have two local men facilitating our groups and promoting the group locally. We have joined all the local Northwich groups and we have seen men attending from Winsford in our sessions too. We are not yet at the stage to offer the physical fitness session just yet. Although we are getting a steady stream of attendance they are still very much discussing some of the challenges they're facing. We always encourage the men to decide on the activities they want to do and we will develop new activities out of the Northwich group in the new year. This will be based on what the men want to do and we will feed this back to you. In addition to our face to face groups we have also reached over 67000 people on our social media and had over 7000 visits to our pages. Most recently we have also been able to secure a story in The Northwich guardian and there was a clear uptick in attendance following that article too.. Overall the funding received by CWaC has enabled us to increase attendance at our groups, reach more people than ever before through our social media, organise our largest ever event and secure space in news media to further increase our reach.