Wellbeing News (23) - Social Prescribing at the Woodland Skills Centre

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Social Prescribing at the Woodland Skills Centre

The Woodland Skills Centre has a 50 acre site in the heart of the Clwydian Range Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Most of the site is woodland but there are also timber-frame Centre buildings, workshops, polytunnels, tree nursery, arboretum, heritage orchard, wildflower meadow, apiary, allotments and vineyard. The Centre is run by a community-owned, not-for-profit Social Enterprise company.

The Centre was set up 25 years ago to run courses in traditional crafts and now runs over 50 different courses a year. These courses mainly attract adults and so another strand was developed for children and families. The Centre runs Holiday Club in the Woods, Family Days, Weekends and Weeks, hosts visits from schools and runs events for Scouts, Guides etc.

We always ask the question, “Who don’t we see?” and so we have developed a third strand to our work which comes under the Social Prescribing heading. It is difficult to define this but it it is about person-centred activities involving a wide range of activities in the outdoors. We are currently running the following programmes : 2 days a week with adults referred though Social Services, 2 days a week on pupil inclusion and regular days with residents of local care homes, adults with autism who are in residential care, support for adult and young carers, activities for pupils in Special Schools, programmes for adults with drug and alcohol related issues, long-term unemployed, a year-round rolling programme for MIND and a volunteer programme.

We believe in the value of social activity in the outdoors and the opportunity for people to meet others in a relaxed situation and to enjoy working outdoors. We are fortunate to have such a large site in a beautiful location and to have facilities such as the allotments, polytunnels, workshops and the permanent main Centre buildings with full disabled access, kitchen, toilets etc. We also believe that the sort of programmes we run should be funded as key elements in society’s health, well-being and caring programmes and should not be reliant on short-term lottery and charity funding.

For more information about the Woodland Skills Centre you can find their contact details below:

tel day - 01745 710626

mobile - 07711 472033

e-mail - enquiries@woodlandskillscentre.co.uk

website - www.woodlandskillscentre.co.uk