I want to show you my dream come true 🤩

The Women’s Health Hub in Hartlepool turned one whole years old this past weekend 🤩 and I hope you will grant me five minutes of your time - to celebrate, to share how it went & to hopefully show you what is possible when you just keep showing up, putting one foot in front of the other, one tiny step forward at a time ❤️.

Over the past twelve months we have hosted hundreds of free-to-access workshops for local women & girls to support their mental & physical wellbeing and to slowly build a community that will hold you through it all. We’ve chatted about pelvic health, prolapse, checking our breasts and cervical screening. We’ve made zines, painted random journal pages for no reason than because it’s fun, we’ve ate plenty cake and we’ve laughed and cried and more. Currently, we see over 100 women+ access the space every month, with people popping in multiple times a week and ‘service users’ quickly becoming friends and then quickly also volunteering their own time.

In a world where we can have hundreds and thousands of online friendships and connections but no one to help us feed our cat when we’re ill1, I truly believe that this kind of physical community building is essential. And I am so incredibly proud of and grateful for every single person who has continued to help build and grow and guide this project 🥰.

The last year has not been without struggle, and there have been so many times where I thought we weren’t going to make it to one. The roof has leaked twice, our access ramp needs replacing, and the first two hours of our birthday party saw us without electricity! I still have to work most days and we still haven’t secured much funding which, with our national lottery grant over half way gone, feels a little scary. But I’m choosing to move forward, to believe in the work and to trust that we will be supported in whatever way that is meant for us. That we will approach it together, as a community - as I saw on Sunday when so many of you brought flasks of hot water down so we could all still have a cuppa with our birthday cake 💕.

That being said, I do want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to support us financially this past year.

With the cost of living crisis continuing and life just generally seeming harder and harder, I know the true worth of this support and I know it hasn’t came easily or necessarily from overflowing bank accounts. It therefore feels even more precious and in need of note.

Taking away £10k of funding from The National Lottery & £1k from The Hospital of God, we have brought just under £6,000 into the CIC bank account in the last year! This really was a team effort - by every single one of you who has became a paid member of this newsletter, who has paid to come along to bookbinding, or wreath making, who has rented the space for a party or as a venue for your own offerings, to those of you who have trusted me to support you in your pregnancies & births, to the wonderful BRIC ladies who fundraised over £300 at their International Women’s Day event - I honestly don’t have enough words to express my gratitude 🙏🏼❤️.

This money has helped us buy the never ending stickers we seem to need for crafts 😂, it’s paid for vital support for me in the form of ‘s virtual assistant work (which is, by extension, helping her build a business and career which fits in with her mothering role), it’s paid for a new baby changing table and weighing scales for newborn mothers to get reassurance and it’s paid for furniture and paint and books and all the other things I never really accounted for at the start (like Wi-Fi).

It hasn’t currently paid for me to work 😆 but I’m okay with that right now and I have to believe that it is coming ❤️.

I want to leave you with this beautiful message I received following our birthday celebrations on Sunday, because it made me cry and I’m going to look at it every time it all feels a bit much, every time it feels like I can’t keep going. Because this right here is my why.

Till next week,

P.S. Speaking of next week - next week will be the release of our third installment of Mindful Bookbinding here on Substack - this is my creative course that guides you through how to hand sew your own journal whilst connecting to the seasons and the magic that is right outside your own front door 🌸. It is for all of my paid subscribers and your money goes directly toward funding the non-profit, including the daily running of The Women’s Health Hub.

I would be so overjoyed and grateful to have you join us ❤️

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