Tottenham community group awarded £10,000

The Wellbeing Circle works with home-schooled young people, reports Olivia Opara

A local community group has been awarded £10,000 to expand its provision for home-schooled young people and their families.

The Wellbeing Circle, a programme that offers help for young people to boost their overall emotional and social wellbeing, was recently awarded the grant by the National Community Fund to continue the expansion of the programme.

The funding will go towards two terms of weekly Wellbeing Children’s Circle and one term of weekly Wellbeing Girls’ Circle in September.

The programme arose from children yoga sessions that Sunrise, a primary school on Coniston Road, offered as part of its extracurricular activities. The school is part of the Sunrise Education Trust, a charitable organisation that has served Tottenham as well as Hackney for more than 40 years.

Natali Castro, who volunteered for Sunrise Trust for over five years and currently runs the WC programmes, said: “The Sunrise Trust is delighted to have heard the good news about the national community fund.

“We worked hard to put the application forward, an idea that was proposed in a parents’ steering meeting as a response to the increased risk of families whose mental health has been even more affected over the last years; as well as to the cost-of-living crisis.”

The National Lottery Awards said that it is “happy to be funding this project”.

The programme is mainly aimed for homeschool children and helps them to lower their levels of anxiety and develop a better understanding of their emotions.

“It’s important that people know there are many families home educating their children with vision and strategies and the Wellbeing Circle is a precious social space, both because it gives them the opportunity to establish social relationships and even more because it models deeply positive ways of relating with each other,” said Natali.

If you are interested in the programme and would like to find out more, email Natali: [email protected]

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