The What? Centre is a children and young people's counselling service with two builidngs one in the north of the Borough near to Dudley Twon Centre and the other in the south of the Borough in Stourbridge. We provide hundreds of counselling sessions each month and over the year several thousand. We are comissioned for some of our work with Children and Young people by Black Country NHS Foundation Trust and also have a HIV service funded through Public Health. The rest of our funding for 18-25's has to be found through Charitable Trusts funding applications but our contracts do not provide us with funds to deal with any repairs or structural issues.
Our services will have been running in Stourbridge for 40 years next year and we have in that time seen generations of young people come through our doors, sometimes parents who saw us when they were children themselves. All of our counsellors are qualified to level 5 or Post Grad or Masters, all are DBS checked. We hold the Queens Award for our service and Investors in People and are accredited by the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).
The age groups we counsel are mainly 5-25 although we do have a Social Enterprise which enables us to counsel adults as well.
We have specialist counsellors who work with younger children and use play therapy as a way of engaging them in the process. Most of our counsellors are Integrative in their Practice which means that their qualification has included the learning and practice of different techniques to enable them to work with a wide range of clients.
We also work with young people who have declared themselves suicidal and so work with them to get them the support that they need. Many of our clients, partiularly ones of 14-25 may also have self-harm issues or may have OCD. Our experience is recognised in that we hold a contract for counselling with the Black Country Trust and lead a consortium of other organisations in that contract.
We also run several LGBTQ+ groups each week which we are currently trying to find extra funding for as well as this has been a vital part of our work.
