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Advice and information, Arts including music, drama, craft and art, Education, training and learning, Food and drink, Gardening and horticulture, Health and wellbeing including therapies, Holidays and short breaks, Planning and representation including advocacy and Support Planning, Socialising, companionship and friendship, User led, Work or volunteering,

The Personalised Forum Group (PFG) is made up of people who live in Doncaster and who have current or previous lived experience of mental ill health. We originally came together as a small group to help each other to create more personalised support solutions to benefit ourselves and our local community.

Our basic premise is that we believe that people can help people and that “paid for care and support” does not always achieve the best outcomes for people.

Although we are a very small local group, we are very active and we now have 360 members. We are also well known nationally for our innovative and pioneering approach.

We do all sorts of things to benefit not just people with mental ill health but all members of the community of Intake in Doncaster on an inclusive basis.

The many things that we do include:

• Running a food and clothing bank
• Maintaining an allotment to grow vegetables for our food bank
• Offering benefits and social welfare advice
• Supporting people into work by working with them on their CV and interviewing skills
• Running peer to peer support activities such as knitting, crochet and cross stitch
• Offering short breaks such as hostel trips
• Helping people to make mutual use of one another’s skills through our Timebank
• Offering training on peer to peer support to local authorities, clinical commissioning groups and other organisations

We are very strongly connected to our local community and we like to empower people to make the most of their different skills. By getting people involved, they feel good about themselves and this creates positive change in their lives.

We love to help people and want to continue to find more ways to help change people’s lives for the better.

One of our big plans for the future is to develop a Community Café, a community enterprise that will work in tandem with our food bank and our vegetable allotment.  In addition to being a welcoming place for all, our Community Café will give opportunities for training and work experience in catering to people who might be facing challenges in the labour market. It will also help us become more sustainable and any profits made will be used to support our other activities.

Last Updated: 15th April, 2015