Losing someone you love can be overwhelming, and many people don’t know where to turn for support. To help with this, local groups in Worcestershire have been running The Bereavement Journey, a seven‑week course that gives people a safe place to talk, understand their feelings and meet others who are going through the same thing.
To make sure the course could run in more places, the St Vincent de Paul Society applied for a Public Health Community Wellbeing Grant. The money paid for a portable projector, which is needed to show the films used in each session. Having their own projector means the team can take the course into different community venues, ensuring no-one is left behind.
Gina from SVP explained how important the funding has been: “The projector has been doing a great job for us. We ran a Bereavement Journey in Droitwich with 7 people, and it was very successful. We also used it for two courses in Evesham with 15 people. Without the projector we would not have been able to deliver these courses.”
One woman who joined the course had been grieving her husband for four years. At first she felt unable to speak or even share her name. By the end, she told the team that her children felt they “had their mother back.”
A second Public Health grant also helped set up The Bereavement Project in Honeybourne and nearby villages, where no similar bereavement support existed before. This project runs a monthly bereavement café and its own seven‑week course, led by trained local volunteers.
The café gives people a friendly place to drop in and talk, while the course offers more structured support to help people understand their grief and feel less alone.
Together, these projects are making sure that people across Worcestershire have the support they need at one of the hardest times in life.
To find out more about how a Public Health community grant could help you improve wellbeing in your neighbourhood please visit: www.worcestershire.gov.uk/communitygrants