by June Faunch
Hello I’m June, I’m 29 and live in my own place in Warrington.
I’m supported by Macintyre’s Shared Lives programme and love spending time with Emily who works with me every week as she helps me with everything in life and even helped me move house this year and buy some furniture for my new place.
Together we deliver an arts and crafts group at the Old School in Warrington. It's now called “June's Crafternoons” and is for anyone that likes arts and craft.
Setting up the arts and crafts group
I decided I wanted to do this as I love creative art and wanted to share my passion with other people - it's brilliant and a nice way to get people out of the house together.
I met up with Emily and Pete to suggest my idea and we looked at a couple of different places for the group and decided on the Old School as lots of people I know use it. We then created a flyer to help start up the group and decided to do it monthly as a start-up. We also advertise this on Facebook and I have now created my own event page and share this with my friends on my own Facebook page.
Bringing people together
I feel really happy to do this as it’s a great way to bring new people together and I’m really pleased we now have Wing Wing and her mum Jenny who have joined the group after recently moving to Warrington from Hong Kong which I know is a different culture. Jackie also recently came to see the group from the NHS stroke rehab team. I was a little shocked that she wants to bring people that are recovering from illness to our group but I’m proud and happy to help contribute to their recovery.
Contributing fights loneliness
Before I started the group I felt really secluded and not very social and unhappy. With Emily’s help and support it expanded from just getting out and about again and meeting people to actually bringing people together and getting out and helping others. I definitely want to continue to contribute to the local community in the future and help more people with my group.
Last word from Pete
Its been clearly evident how much June's confidence and wellbeing has developed since the start of the Crafternoon group with the support from Emily and her friends in the group too. The group is now reaching out to new people and communities and I love how June adds themes to each monthly session and how it brings laughter and general social fun for all in the room.
Pete Connor - Manager
