YMCA Health & Wellbeing Network Friday 26 June 2026

Hi guys. Hi, you alright? Good, good, thank you. We'll wait for some more people to join. Hope everyone's okay and keeping cool.

It's not easy to keep calling our offices. I can't complain, we've got air con so I can't complain at all. Well we just had a meeting in our spinning room which was really nice because the air conditioning's really fierce in there. Do we know how many have accepted the meeting? I think they're around 11. Okay.

We just had one apology. I know Angus isn't coming from St Paul's. I think some people are on holiday. How dare they? We'll wait a little bit longer. I had my home wi-fi go down because of the heat down in London. So as far as those backgrounds and the noise, I had to run

my local cafe connected us so sorry about that but it just honestly like the heat is really definitely in my flat so yeah we keep we were getting power dips the other day and that knocked the wi-fi out um completely so uh yeah i think that's what's happening yeah it's not that i've had any lights on for the last little while anyway okay okay kate's in

Okay, we'll give it a couple more minutes and then we'll get started, I think. I wondered whether the turnout was going to be great with the problems everyone's having with schools closing as well and having to not work because kids can't go to school. It's sort of problems all round.

I don't know whether any of you in leisure centres have got any of your areas that haven't got air conditioning, but our main, I guess, sports hall where we hold the vast majority of our classes doesn't have AC. So I've spent the last two, three days literally trying to move things around and

hope people dropped out of classes, which is a first, so that they'd be small enough to go into the studio that only holds 34, rather than nearly 60 in the main hall. So it's presented sort of quite a lot of challenges. So it'd be interesting what challenges other people have had over that. But our after-school club's also been affected massively too. Shall we get started?

Or do you want to give it a couple more minutes? I'm happy to start. I think we should start. We can catch people up if they need to. Maybe we can do quick prior introductions, just five minutes, and then dive into stuff. Okay. Okay.

All right. So, guys, thank you for joining. I feel and I assume you agree because you're here. It's really valuable to have independent YMCA centres together because we all work as one, but actually independently and work in slightly different ways with different communities, different challenges, etc.,

So we can't compare, we can't standardise, but we can share what's working and what's not working and what challenges others are facing and take away ideas on how we can adapt things perhaps in our own settings. There's a huge amount of experience between us and hopefully we can make the most of that. We'll go around with a quick round-robin of basically role models

which YMCA and what you do, if that's okay. If we can start, if I go from my screen here with Simon. Is that working? It's working. Perfect. Great. My name is Simon, Simon Burgess. I'm Head of Health and Wellbeing for YMCA Brunel Group. So I'm based in Bath, 98% of the time. At the club here, we've got about a thousand members. We've got air conditioning as well, which is handy. And yeah, we run...

Lots of fitness classes, got two studios, lots of classes, lots of personal training, lots of cool stuff. And yeah, life is pretty good. No real bad things to speak of, which on a Friday afternoon is good, you know? Thank you, Simon. No worries. And Daniel?

Hello I'm Daniel, I'm Project Resilience Coordinator at 1YMCA and basically what Project Resilience does is deliver sports and exercise sessions across our housing side so it's people living in temporary accommodation having experienced homelessness and over the last three years we've supported 637 people getting to sports and exercise. Perfect thank you and Claire?

Hi, I'm Claire Morgan. I work at YMCA Derbyshire and I work in the People Services team. So for me, this is my first session. So it's really about what everyone's doing to support their staff solely for what I'm here for. OK, that's a good one. All right. And Kate?

Hi everyone, I'm Kate Holer, I work alongside Julie at YMCA East Surrey. I look after all the targeted health well-being, so exercise, referral, disability sports and their health promotion programme. Thank you very much. Just a little bit about YMCA East Surrey. We've got 1,900 members, we've got three studios plus a spin studio and we are

We are a really inclusive facility. Kate does brilliantly with the targeted, but we pride ourselves on being really, really inclusive anyway, which is why we're thrilled with Pulse equipment, to be fair. So, yeah, that's just about us. We're doing quite well with our facility here.

So, OK, so basically what we're going to do then is we asked you for some topics and we've got a few here. So if we sort of have a look at if you put your hands up, if you want to actually share something with targeted work such as exercise referral work,

and it would be it'd be interesting to know how you make your centre inclusive to all from a general use perspective as well as as targeted but the this was such as exercise referral so there's disability sports etc so how do you make your centre or your facility or what you're doing with targeted work work and what challenges have you got does anyone want to kick off

Kate, I'm happy to start the conversation. So, as mentioned, we have a big exercise referral scheme here. It's been working, it's been running for over 20 years, really successfully. We've had ongoing funding through a pot of money from NHS for the last year.

I think about 25 years. We have direct referrals from GPs and healthcare professionals to our services. We have a range of staff who are qualified in level three exercise referral and then some level four specialisms like cardiac rehab, pulmonary rehab, cancer rehab, Parkinson's stroke, neurological conditions, all those

sorts of things. And we have a big programme running Monday to Friday of wellbeing gym sessions, which are kind of for the lowest risk clientele up to cardiac rehab, where they've fairly recently been discharged from the NHS. They then come to us to continue their rehab programme. What also works really well for us is that the NHS operate their phase three, their own cardiac rehab. They actually do in our premises, and

So the clients who come, well, they're patients at that point, they do their card check we have through...

through the NHS on our site and then we then take them onto our level four scheme. So for the client, it's a really nice, it's a sort of nice through journey. They already know the centre. They're familiar with what happens. They're familiar with the space, with the equipment and some of the staff as well. So, yeah, for us, the exercise referral is very successful. It's not profitable. It's sort of subsidised services.

um but it's a very successful um sort of preventative and rehabby type um program which we're really proud of for me the biggest challenge is funding um as i mentioned earlier the funding that we've had sort of year on year for 25 years for the first time this year is really in doubt um i've only managed to have it confirmed for the first two quarters of the year um and at the moment i have no idea what's going to happen um for quarter three so that's

a little bit stressful. I don't think that's unusual. The funding landscape at the moment is pretty dire. I've been hoping to have some, been applying to all sorts of trusts,

and groups for more funding for our disability sports programme to kind of develop that a little bit more and we're not getting anywhere at the moment. So that's for me the biggest sort of challenge of the targeted side of the work is it doesn't particularly make any money. It's trying to keep it running at a sensible cost to sort of cover its own costs and funding is difficult. But that's a sort of a little bit of a snapshot about some of the things that we do here. Anyone has any questions or questions?

I mean I sort of see it happening here and it's pretty diverse because it's also disability sports etc as well. Does anyone else have exercise referral or disability sports, multi-sports at their settings? They want to add anything, any challenges that you've got or anyone else got problems with funding or raised around it? Simon?

Hello. Yeah, we sort of have exercise referral, but it's a bit like you guys were just saying, you know,

or your fitness, your exercise, sorry, your health professional, can you come and see us? And they often just sort of push us away a little bit. They're a bit too far away or they don't want to do it. I think they want the silver bullet from the doctor or their health professional rather than actually having to work for a little bit of health and wellbeing. So we sort of,

you know, sort of pre-COVID, sort of post-COVID, I really wanted to push it and see if we'd get somewhere with it. But it's interesting you say, Kate, that you run the project, you get the funding, but it doesn't actually still make a lot of sort of money. So I'm not being...

I've not been as passionate about it as maybe I should be but we do other things like we have a young person's membership from like 11 to 15 year olds and that's just a straight membership where you know and that in a way maybe is sort of taking the place of the exercise referrer where we're going we're working with other young people that would normally be sitting home playing computer games they'd maybe be you know out vaping and stuff like that and we have

we have um if i look up my screen i look up in a sec last time i checked we had about 150 young members paying their young member membership and you know so that sort of is quite a um it's quite a dedicated sort of thing a dedicated group of sort of targeted work that we do with all young people they all get a consultation with one of the trainers they all get in a program we know about young training young people

you know, and the contraindications and stuff. So we sort of, yeah, I love what you do, Kate, but it's got to be said, the thought had occurred to me where we were sort of bashing our head against a brick wall. And I was thinking, actually, even if we get it to run with really, really efficiently, it's still not going to actually work.

sort of you know be profitable which isn't necessarily the outcome of it because we've got other profitable streams but it's not it's not you know i just sort of changed tack with it so we sort of now we have targeted groups we have a couple of free not free we have a couple of community yoga groups a week where people can come and do yoga here twice a week and they can pay whatever they want so if they can't afford to pay anything they don't pay anything um bath being bath

We have lots of people that can afford to pay but choose not to pay. And we work with the young people's membership. So, yeah, I love what you're doing, Kate. And I can see your frustrations. And our frustration really was actually...

getting the clients to engage. The referral came through and bless Neil, who's my lead sort of on the exercise referral scheme. You know, every time we phone someone up, they come up with an excuse why they can't make it in. And in the end, we sort of, yeah, we don't not push it, but we don't push it anymore. We have surgeries we work with and we get referrals as and when. But yeah, sadly, yeah, I can see, I can see a sort of frustrations with the funding particularly, Kate, you know?

It isn't easy, is it? I think funding is becoming worse at the moment as well. Actually, in Surrey, we've got a big change in our sort of local government, haven't we? So that's also not helping with the council changes. So...

We have from age 13 onwards, and it does bring its own challenges, doesn't it, in the gym. We restrict our numbers. We have a waiting list for numbers. I think we restrict it at 200, but...

we have a waiting list because if you let them, all of the youngsters in, then we get big problems with the seniors. But yeah, it has its own problems. But we've found a couple of membership suspensions and suddenly it gets around all schools and they start behaving themselves. So does anything, Daniel, what have you got to add?

So it might be a bit of a different way of looking at things, but I work with people with homelessness and one of the biggest barriers we've had with trying to access gym is from a price point perspective. So I've worked with a couple of everyone actives locally to

offer a reduced membership of like £2 day passes. So I'll take residents there and do weekly gym sessions with them and they've gone and accessed them themselves. So it might be an opportunity in terms of like being inclusivity. If you've got any housing accommodation sites locally to you that you run, or if there's any local homeless charities that you might be able to reach out to, you might be interested in looking at that, maybe offering it for when you're quiet around the gym, if you have quieter areas to...

open that up inclusivity, I would, from experience, I would set up like rules and stuff like that, like ensuring like a member of staff comes with someone for maybe a couple of weeks to confirm that they're using the gym sensibly and monitoring behaviour before allowing them access themselves. But it's a way of giving them access, giving them independence.

and that might be another funding pot to go to your council with or we're you know supporting people with complex needs from a disadvantaged background can you offer us funding pot I also know that Sports England do a movement fund which is about 15,000 potential pounds of funding and we applied for that last year to renovate our sports hall that's in one of our sites and got the whole sports hall refurbished and that was based on the fact of

engaging our residents into badminton. So with your GP referral schemes, that might be an avenue to go down to look at like, you know, maybe looking at those barriers that you mentioned, Simon, of why people aren't able to access a GP scheme and maybe put a grant or an application for like, can we offer travel? Can we reduce these barriers? You know, we've had all these applicants and this is the feedback they've had back. Could we have this funding to reduce those barriers? Just, yeah, just that helps.

That's really helpful. I mean, we have our own housing and we've got about 15 buildings in all and we offer free membership to all of our residents.

It would be interesting to hear from Angus when he's at the next one from St Paul's group because they have the same sort of model as us. But it's a very good point that you make. But if you don't have, not everyone has a leisure facility, it's a really good idea that you've had there to actually approach people

the um the other people around you other gyms around you um for off peak and that sort of thing it's a really really good idea and a good model to maybe follow through so um does anyone else do anything similar or actually julie just like you said we obviously have quite a lot of housing projects here at the at the gym and uh and we do work with the local um

sort of like addiction charities so we have a membership we have two memberships with one of the local sort of addiction charities where they come in and they use their gyms and again they book them in and everyone gets a consultation so that you know gets consultation and a workout so we have quite a lot we've had that i think like you said kate we've we've had that now for oh about 28 years we've been running that we've been running like uh and then you know memberships with the local sort of

drug rehab for a bit of all i've worked or you know sort of abuse rehab sort of charities and we obviously have quite um

we have quite a lot of housing for our young people as well so again we have memberships for them and the actual day stop we have here which is a project for young people that have got nowhere to sort of go in the day they they've bought which is another arm of the same of the YMCA here they've bought a couple of memberships so those young people can come and use the facilities

for free as well so we have sort of like yeah we have actually a couple of other specialist areas that we work with as well that's brilliant it's all sort of um different context transferable ideas aren't they so um thank you um does anyone else have anything that they want to add on any targeted work or exercise referral anything like this and before we move on

Okay, I'm not quite sure because obviously these agenda items were put forward by people that were going to attend the meeting. We've got one here that is volunteer award and recognition. Obviously we have volunteers that help us massively in our service deliveries.

I don't know whether anybody's finding that volunteers are slightly harder to get now when because a lot of retired people now actually need to work rather than volunteer but I don't quite know if anyone's got anything they want to add on this volunteer award and recognition. Yeah sorry for bugging everyone but yeah I do actually with this. Yeah that's good. I think I mentioned we run the qualifications here we run the qualifications for three years

So we've been, you know, sort of the fitness qualifications and we've had various volunteers over the years. And actually I'm just about to take on two new young volunteers. One lady who's contacted me sort of out of the blue would like to come and get some experience and work as a volunteer within the club. And then one of the chaps who's just finished our level two gym structures qualification, he's going to be starting voluntary work next month as well.

So I tend to find the volunteers tend to come to us, but particularly through running the qualifications. So rather than finding, as you just mentioned, Julie, like an older volunteer, it tends to be the young people wanting experience. I've got obviously some students that are coming in over the next few weeks for work experience from their school. Yeah, we've got that. But yeah, no, voluntary wise, that's how actually, I think all but about two of my team have started as volunteers.

And I've come through the ranks that way. So it's interesting. I saw that on the agenda and the recognition part is often the fact that either they get CV building out of it as young people or, as in the case of a few of them, they've actually got a paid job. And when I sort of set it up at the start, I'm really clear. I say that there is no job.

but there might be a job you never know how the world's going to change so yeah that's sort of where we are with i've got i've got two volunteers starting next month um really keen to sort of uh to further their career in health and well-being that's really interesting um so i mean we we

Kate has a young volunteer currently. We do have quite a few volunteers, but Kate has a young volunteer currently. And one of my fitness instructors started as a volunteer about nine years ago. But I don't know whether anyone else has got anything that they want to add to that.

I have. So we do have quite a lot of volunteers. We don't do anything like what Simon does with qualifications. But we do do an annual staff celebration where we give out awards for long service. We also do that for our volunteers as well.

So if they've been with us for five, 10, you know, 15 years, they are getting a certificate, a little badge and a, you know, and a little gift just so that we're saying thank you for all their hard work over the years. But we also do like little, you know,

awards where they can be voted for so you know if they've been outstanding for that year or um you know helping in other departments so people can get to vote for them as well so we incorporate our volunteers as you know into our staff celebrations as well that's really nice actually in fact that's um that's a really lovely one that you get um the awards etc yeah

Anything else? Anyone else that has volunteers that has a different... Anything different to say? Okay.

Innovative ideas and programs. This is a good one. We're quite diverse. So I would imagine that different things work in different settings for us. But there's probably quite a lot that we can share. And with the wider group, when we sort of have more people with us after the holidays, does anyone have anything running at present or anything in the pipeline? Any different program, any projects?

lovely ideas that they've come up with okay hi um and again apologies for the background noise please let me know if that becomes a problem um but i um

remember a question that we had during our first meeting about England and Wales priorities and I actually spoke with our policy manager this week to bring some stuff to this meeting about potential health and wellbeing priorities that maybe we wanted to work on and I thought that maybe I could float these with you as some of these innovative programs that don't quite exist yet within England and Wales

But I just wanted to kind of get an idea about what people who work in the space are interested by and maybe some of the challenges or ideas about what we could do as a forum.

So the kind of the first one was especially with the social media band, we had a conversation around phone addiction and your like health and well-being online and maybe like voices or classes about how to deal with screen time, screen addiction, concerns around you know habits online and keeping good mental health in that space.

We thought that that was something that actually fell under health and well-being and it's more poignant than ever, especially with the ban. Something that I also found interesting was I attended NATO in America last month and one of their national campaigns was around water safety. And again, I thought that was quite interesting because I read something in the news this week due to the heat wave. They've seen...

an increase of drownings of people trying to cool down with natural bodies of water and not having space for a lot of practice or strong swimming skills and then unfortunately getting too far or even drowning as a result.

So that's again something I thought as it's what the YMCA's do in America they take that on as social responsibility and community service to have water safety classes, wouldn't necessarily have to be swimming instruction. I know like not all of us have pools but if any of us but something in that space too.

And then again, we were talking about kind of the benefits of having nutrition courses and classes and then educating people around, you know, in a similar vein of community outreach and service and having classes around like how to eat well, how to cook well.

um look after yourself and your physical health uh when it comes to nutrition um and then the final thing that we mentioned was the uh we call them active fundraising challenges so that's a lot of the news that i write uh for like fundraising which is like you'll have people doing mountain treks and raising thousands of pounds you have people like cycling i don't know if anyone saw

there was a world record broken someone attempted 40 Ironman triathlons every single day in a row to fundraise for Wednesday which is an incredible feat for her 40th birthday not my kind of party but still incredible and that's again kind of healthy well-being aspects of pushing yourself physically to fundraise for charity and

maybe that's something that we could, I don't know, develop or kind of create a resource around because it's a super popular way to fundraise and as a healthy wellbeing forum, maybe take on.

uh national approach to that so these are just some ideas uh we had of kind of like innovative programs uh that we could i don't know discuss about would love to hear your thoughts i know i just spoke for a lot but um

Yeah, interesting to hear what she said. With challenge, we've got that on the agenda, actually. I don't know whether anyone else does these challenges. We have been doing them for a long time. This year, they cycled to Paris, which was a fundraiser. They've just literally done the three peaks. And we've got all sorts of things. In fact, Kate's the challenge manager.

So she's actually, she's about to start doing, arranging all of the challenges for next year. But we've got all sorts of challenges. If anyone wants to hear about them, Kate can talk you through them. And they raise a lot of money for us, but also health and wellbeing aspect for people, you know, members, etc.,

Most of my team actually did the Three Peaks Challenge. I had to work virtually all weekend to cover their shifts, which wasn't much fun, but they had a harder time. But if anyone wants to hear anything about that, we can sort of just bring that in now. Or if anyone's got any of their own challenges that they have,

or any ideas. Where does the money go, Julie? When you raise the money, does that go into the health and wellbeing? Do you invest that back into the health and wellbeing? It can go wherever you want. Last year, we actually did it to get the youth bus. And so we said where it was going. It was going to raise money to actually purchase a youth bus.

This year, I'll get Kate to say where it's going to this year. But you could have it going into health and wellbeing if that's what you wanted to do. Yes, as long as you say when people are getting the sponsorships and paying to actually take part in it where it's going, then that's it. But Kate can tell you about this year's where it's gone. Yes, so we have what's called the Life Change Fund Fund.

which is sort of the generic kind of pot that it all goes into. But specifically this year, we are raising funds for a new housing project. So we've got being built at the moment, we've got a new two houses being built, not that far from here to house 14 young people. So all the life change funding this year is going to go towards kitting out those young

those properties. So I think we've got funding and we've put some money in ourselves to build the property to actually make the shell. And then what we're asking through all the fundraising is that it's sort of turning them from houses into homes. So we've done lots of sort of fundraising literature about, you know, £25 would buy a duvet, £10

50 pounds would buy you know so we're trying to get make it quite tangible for people fundraising that if they get a certain amount um that sort of represents um various aspects of these new houses um like

We said, for example, on the Paris Challenge, we told people that two and a half thousand pounds would kit out a whole room. And then when we got back, someone made a direct donation for two and a half thousand pounds to kit out a whole room, which was amazing. So we try and make it sort of as tangible as we can. And because a lot of the people that take on our challenges are local, because they might be members in the gym or they might just know about us locally, they can actually see us.

the the um the fruits of their labor as such they can see the house is being built when we did the as julie mentioned the youth bus this this um mobile youth club a couple of years ago now you can see it driving around the streets of red hill and merstam and it's amazing to think you know we funded that by climbing ben nevis so we try and make it really tangible and let people know where their funds are going thanks kate

Has anyone got anything else they want to talk about on challenges? I mean, I think it's a really interesting way of raising funds for your facility, whatever your facility is, and it's sort of tying in

as Annie said, with health and wellbeing. - Yeah, I was gonna ask, well Kate, I guess you run these programmes, do you do any kind of health and wellbeing practise when you do these challenges? Because sometimes it is quite tough on the body and mentally to do these deep peaks, especially the three peaks. And do you do any kind of practise around making sure people are fit and able or up for it?

you know do you have to keep it to grow? Yeah so we run um so usually in the summer we have one um sort of yeah a big hike this year obviously it was three peaks other years it's been you know a singular mountain or a range of mountains and we have one or two cycling challenges they're always in the summer and we start in January we start a sort of um

training program so we have um weekly well actually no they're not weekly to start with their monthly um cycle rides they go out on a sunday all led by volunteer ride leaders and over the months they will ramp up in sort of um distance and um challenge level we do the same for walking as well so we again we've got uh trained and walk leaders i suppose for want of expression that um

So we have monthly treks and cycles to prepare people for the big challenges. They're also open to people who aren't doing the challenge, who might just want to have something, you know, to do on the weekends. And then when the clocks change in spring, we then bring in weekly cycle and walks as well. So we really do try and train people to be able to undertake the challenge. We are lucky that we live...

in the soey hills so we've got plenty of playground for them to practice on and we've got a loop that we use near box hill if anyone's heard of box hill um where we try and get people and do a certain number of loops over time to train up to be able to do eight loops of collie hill before they go on the challenge and then we can see that their progress that they they've you know they really do go on a bit of a transformative journey and to get ready for these challenges

That's really great to hear that you take that seriously because I can imagine if you're halfway to Paris and someone's not doing so well, it's obviously causing a problem. I'm interested if you would want to work as a forum to create some, I don't know, people are taking on these big physical challenges, guidelines or help guides, something like that, for getting people up to speed and realising what they're

I mean it's just something that we could do as a forum and actually have some good output. That would be a good idea. Kate's actually an experienced runner as well but there's a lot behind it. You have to have support teams going with the cyclists for example. I've been on support to a Paris one so you literally track them in a minibus, go ahead of them and then they have support stops

Kate went on the three peaks and she went halfway up two mountains to bring anyone back if they didn't want to finish it or couldn't but they all did Snowdon so she ended up having to do the whole of that one because she didn't

So there's a lot behind it. And our CEO is really passionate about these. We've been doing it for over 20 years now. And there's a lot of funds raised from it. So, yeah, if anyone wants any information, Kate's your person. Yeah, I definitely think this could be a good resource to bring to our students who'd like to start doing this kind of fundraising, but maybe haven't had as much experience as you guys, the experts, I guess so.

Yeah, I think as well, just one last thing to add is obviously we, one of our sort of taglines for these challenges is that we'd like transforming young lives in terms of where the fundraising is going. It's making, you know, as I say, it's going into something like a project for young people who are homeless. But what I've also found is we're also transforming the lives of the people taking part.

So they the experiences they've had cycling to Paris or doing the three peaks, although it's not really about them because they're doing it to raise money. They also have an experience they'll never forget. No, 100 percent. I think that's why health and well-being is such a vital, I think, part of. And it's some of the stuff that you were doing, Daniel, by like making health and well-being accessible to people experiencing homelessness is what you're saying about the gyms.

uh two pound say you know entry fees like that is such important work because it does have huge impact feeling these findings show you know proving to yourself you can do these big feats so important to people and like yeah lowering those barriers like creating opportunity um what you do by letting people challenge themselves like this in a in a safe manner but um i think it's really important i think it's really great for the people who are

potentially going through tough times, young people who are experiencing homelessness, like to do these kind of challenges is so great for them and part of, yeah, some of the support that you can give them at OYMCA. Okay. Is anyone else running any different types of programs? I mean, we're running a menopause program. Is anyone running anything that's sort of topical? No? Oh, okay. Sorry. Daniel?

So, more a programme that we're looking into starting. So, from our work with what we've delivered with our housing residents, we've been in talks with our local sports partnership as they get funding from the Police and Crime Commissioner to look at reducing sport in between its 11 to 25 year olds, but

they're struggling between the ages of 18 to 25 year olds to get their program get into their program it's like crime reduction through sports and exercise so we're talking with them about basically either funding us to help support who we're helping directly at the moment to support us doing more of that um and feeding into this crime reduction and or looking into actually

as another aspect of Project Resilience running it in the community. So being open to young people between the ages of 18 to 25 to support them. And it's like young people that have had ACEs, young people that have been in with the criminal justice system. So that's a project that we're looking into and it may be a potential funding opportunity or something for like you to look into or other YMCA to look into with their local sports partnership.

That's really interesting as well. Does anyone else have anything that they want to put into this one? Claire, you've unmuted. Just with the menopause group that you were just on about then, that you set up, is that for your staff or is that for...?

Yeah, it's for both. I've got two. I've got a six-week menopause program that I wrote, which is an hour and a half once a week. And that's a sellable course, but it's also free for staff to attend. And that's got half an hour of exercise and then an hour of knowledge and talking and tea. And then...

As I say, that's free for staff as well. We run that at daytime and an evening one. I've also written Menopause for Managers, which is a PowerPoint presentation, and that's for men as well. And that's for how to deal with it in the workplace, how to

basically recognize it and small changes that can be made, et cetera, because of the amount of talent that we lose every year due to women failing

feeling their jobs left them and it's very sad. I've also put together something that I deliver for other companies it's been delivered to the NHS actually their theatre team which is a powerpoint one and a half hours interactive that's for menopausal women but that's

It's not, you know, doing it over a six-week period. It's sort of more of a snapshot, but it goes into depth with it. But it's for staff as well. The menopause for managers was to staff, and I'm hoping from September to be able to do a Teams one for all staff to attend if they want to, which is the one-hour, one-and-a-half-hour

information session. Yeah. Sorry. Is that also across England and Wales or is that just internal at your YMCA? Well, it's just at my YMCA, but I have, I've written it myself. I'm a tutor, so I have no problem if anyone wanted to use it, but it's something I've written myself. Yeah, that's amazing. And I think it's super applicable for everyone at the YMCA. Yeah. So,

It's been very, very well received, I have to say. So we've done quite a bit. Well, we've tried to do quite a bit on menopause. We have we used to do some groups. It's sort of dropped off, which is why I was sort of wondering what what sort of things you were doing. But we were sort of having we have menopause buddies.

um and we were trying to do sort of meetings where we would get some speakers in and maybe go on a walk have a bit of a chat about how people are coping with menopause obviously open to every member of staff that's even men as well um but we were finding that we got a big uptake and then all of a sudden it just dropped off um and now it's sort of like we don't do anything so it's something i want to look at how we can bring back

But it's just sort of how everybody else is doing stuff. I mean, the way I did it was over the six weeks was every week had a different topic. So one was looking at nutrition. One was looking at pelvic floor strength training and the ways that you can sort of HRT, the ways you can actually deal with menopause. So every week had a different topic. They had lots of handouts.

And the groups became really, the groups were amazing because they were really helping each other. But with that particular type of group, it needs to be women only because they were opening up. The one for the managers or the general staff is different. Yeah.

you sort of don't go into too much specifics about it um I feel and that's really a one-off or you can follow up through with it I felt six weeks but then you leave the people with a whatsapp group um and you could we're just having a cafe um built and my intention for the September one that I'm starting once I'm starting is to actually set up sort of um

After we do the course, it's to set up just a sort of an hour a week where we've got the menopause cafe where we can just meet and ask questions because the groups really, really, including the staff were amazing. Staff really bonded over it. So, yeah, but it's a tricky one to keep the attendance. Yeah.

Definitely there's like a need for those two different audiences, right? Where if you want a more community about like this is something we're all sharing together and one is a bit more informative for working and supporting people going through art, like experiencing it firsthand.

100% yeah but again I think that's a super great resource that like as a forum we could like I'm just thinking about what we could uh work deliver together as a forum and that is 100% something that would be uh yeah if you're happy we could all work on it together and Julie it sounds like you've done an amazing job with it already but Claire you've also done work on it we could

Yeah, I mean, mine's all done with PowerPoint, etc. So it's sort of quite, quite structured. So yeah, I'm happy to do that.

um does um we've sort of moved on to the health and well-being for staff with this and i know that um i i think claire you you were keen on this topic was it you that was keen on this topic or was that the menopause that you were thinking of or did you have other things for it for me it was just really getting some ideas of you know for our staff being people services that you know

For us as a YMCA, there's loads of things going off, which I'm just not involved in, you know, whether it's for service users or our learners, because that's just not my department. But obviously it is about how I can make sure our staff are being supported. So it was really, for me, it was just seeing what other people were doing.

for their staff's health and well-being and if there's anything I can take away from that to you know incorporate here for us we don't have gyms or any you know sort of the facilities here for our staff so it's just what other things we could be looking at if that makes sense yeah absolutely I mean from our perspective we I do menopause sorry mindfulness at the desk

And seated menopause at the desk. Great. Mindfulness at the desk and seated Pilates just to encourage people to be able to pull themselves away from their screen or whatever they're doing for

sort of three, five minutes, that sort of thing. That's sort of something we do. And I know we've got different things that people can access if they need assistance with mental health and that sort of thing. But does anybody else have any programs or anything that they offer? So, oh, Daniel?

It's slightly different, but you could apply it to your members of staff. So we've worked with a company called Daily Five that has an app and an online platform that does five minutes of daily exercises. So it's useful for me to use with residents that are keen to exercise when I'm not there.

and participate with activities. I can help support them with like, oh, do this yoga class or do this box size class. So that might be something you could look into as if staff were looking at how can I be healthier or,

to have to de-stress in the workplace, it's not just like exercise classes, there's also wellbeing aspects to it as well, like breathing classes and stuff like that. So that might be worth looking into. And that's an app that can be downloaded then, is it? So it's an online platform and an app. So it's called Daily Five. Daily Five? Yeah, if you want, I can contact the person, the CEO of it and...

ask if he's happy for me to share his details with you and send it over. Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, I'll have a look at that. That's really interesting. I mean, we've got free staff membership, but as you say, Daniel, not everyone's got a gym. And so that sort of thing is ideal. Or for those that are a little bit more remote, I'm going to look into that as well. Does anyone have any other questions on health and wellbeing for staff? No.

Or any of you got anything you want to add into that? I think this is a really important one that needs to be across the whole of the YMCA. We could all help ourselves. Claire? Oh, okay.

All right. All right, then. So I don't quite know what we... Oh, Claire, did you have something? No? No, sorry. I just had someone at the door. Okay, no worries. I can't read a sign to say do not disturb. No worries. You know how it is.

I'm not sure about the accommodation specific for young adult carers, whether the person that was put that on is on this call. So if they are, speak now. Otherwise, we'll maybe have to put that off to the next agenda. So no, I don't believe they are.

All right. So we've covered challenging challenge events. Does anyone else have anything that they want to either discuss here, any other business, anything they do or some suggestions of topics for the next network meeting?

Well, I was just thinking, I was hoping that we could, I was, I've made a quick survey that maybe I could spend around maybe people in the network about what we want to achieve together as a network and what we want to deliver, having sat in a few of the other network sessions and speaking

I think that's been a really worthwhile practice that so many other networks have done is talking about priorities in this area that we would like to work together to achieve and bring back to the rest of the Federation. And I think that is to be a good point of what we do and why we meet next time is some of the really useful stuff we have talked about today, like the menopause courses and the Pelvin event.

thinking about how do we develop those really great programs that currently exist at one YMCA and how we can bring them to our national movement. So but then also like, doesn't have to be what we talked about today, because it's something that we've got to tackle. It's completely new. Again, like something that I was speaking about with some new fan on social media, do we want to think about a national program around health and well being online?

So just my group of thoughts, what I think we could really make impactful work here as a group. I don't know how people felt about that. Oh yeah, are you going to send something around for us to sort of, yeah, that would be really helpful. Are people interested in that? Yeah.

That would be good, so we can get an idea of what will benefit us all and what we're all interested in. That would be cool. And obviously, I'm hoping that on the Y Hub, we can put more gender items for the September meeting as well, which will be really helpful. Does anyone have it? Oh, Daniel. Daniel?

So, yeah, so just thinking like more joint working together. So I've got, I've set up like a resident football teams and we've had great success playing against local charities. So we play monthly games against dens, we play games against a single homeless project and I've

other like man on like charity projects for local football clubs run like Stevenage and Watford. And I think it'd be good, you know, if people got similar projects or even, you know, if you've just got a football team that your centre has to just set up games, because I think it can be beneficial to both,

groups of players and with the World Cup this year, maybe not this year, but in a couple of years time when we're thinking about challenges and fundraising opportunities, you know, in four years time, could we have like a YMCA World Cup where we've got football teams from all diverse backgrounds coming together at a central event?

That would be so much fun. I love that idea. Yeah, it's a really good idea. I think we're trying to figure out ways to bring the YMCA's together, right? And understand that we are a national union, not just boroughs. Local YMCA, and that is such a fun way to do that. I think everyone will really enjoy that. Did anyone go to Elevate last week, by the way?

No? Okay. Maybe next time we could, I always go over to Elevator, take my team over there. If anyone goes next week, next year, we could maybe meet. It'd be good. It's a very, very good forum there. A lot of things happening. So, okay. Does anyone else have anything that they want to add? Any other business at all?

No, in which case we're going to put onto the YHub the suggestions for, that you could put please for next week's, next month, no, September meeting, September the 22nd. That's going to be earlier. That's going to be at 10.30. But so please do that because it's obviously the things that we discuss are the things that

can help each other. What works for one person might not work for another, but we can get little things from it and it's really helpful. So,

So we've gained four minutes of your day. So unless Annie has something that she wants to say, I will close the meeting. But thank you so, so much for your attendance. And I hope to see you and more of you next time. And I do feel that it's a really, really important forum for us to meet. So thank you so much, guys. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.