Hello!
We can’t believe the end of term is fast approaching and with it the end of another school year! It has been a fantastic year for Life & Soul and we would love to fill you in on all of our most recent updates.
Throughout this year our team of Connect mentors have been working in six local secondary schools; we continue to receive amazing feedback of young lives changed for the better through our support. Do read the quotes above and case studies below which are examples of the difference Connect mentoring can make.
God is enlarging our tent…again!
At Easter we started Connect Mentoring in Hill View School in Tonbridge. They had heard about the work that we do from a colleague in a Tunbridge Wells school. Since then, we have been approached by two more schools in and around Tonbridge wanting us to start mentoring in September.
This is really exciting, however, it means an increase of 50% in our Connect Mentoring work locally in a short space of time! We will need to train and resource more volunteers and increase our admin capacity to manage this.
We need your support to be able to do this –
ICE Ilfracombe
Connect Mentoring is now well established in Ilfracombe Academy, run by local charity ICE. They currently have mentors going in each week, each mentor is assigned to a year group and sees pupils from that year.
Life Without Limits
The team of both staff and volunteers have worked in 24 local schools over the last year, delivering both Unlimited (our self-esteem building course) and Limitless (our transition to secondary school course). Again, the feedback has been consistently great from the school and children.
Some sad goodbyes and an excited hello!
We were sad to say goodbye to Helen at the end of May and at the end of this term we will sadly to be saying goodbye to Steph too. Both Helen and Steph have worked on the Life Without Limits team in primary schools and their warm-heartedness, wise words and hard work in delivering the courses has been so appreciated and will be missed. Congratulations to Helen on the birth of her baby girl, Esther, and best wishes to Steph on her counsellor training.
We are thrilled to welcome Rosemarie to our Life Without Limits team. Rosemarie has done some volunteering on the team in the past and enjoyed it enough to want to join us permanently. Some of you may know Rosemarie from the work she does with children and families at The Wells Church. She brings a wealth of love and experience of working with children and we are excited to have her on the team.
Plant sale
The first weekend of May saw the office full of an incredible array of indoor and outdoor plants, all kindly donated by Life & Soul supporters. On a beautiful sunny Saturday morning we set up our stall outside the office and by 1pm all the plants had gone and we had raised a whopping £1,000!
An enormous thank you to everyone who donated plants or came to purchase them, or both! And a huge thank you to Heather who came up with the idea and did most of the organising. Thank you to Cheryl, Nick and Paul for their help on the day.
