THE WISHING WELL
WE ARE A MINDFULNESS SOCIAL ENTERPRISEMINDFULNESS SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
The BeingWell wishes the community in which it exists and works well. The BeingWell is a social enterprise. This means that we put mindfulness over profits. We use a proportion of all profits to give mindfulness to people who might otherwise never be able to go on a mindfulness course. We put the wellbeing of Tower Hamlets at the centre of our mission as a business.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC DIVIDES IN TOWER HAMLETS
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Canary Wharf annual economy
The BeingWell is in the heart of the very unique social and financial situation of Tower Hamlets. Here lies Canary Wharf, one of the world’s most pressurised working environments. The towering skyscrapers generate an economy of £6 billion – larger than that of Jersey, Monaco and Malta. This is starkly juxtaposed with the fact that 20% of Tower Hamlet’s households live on an annual income of £15,000 or less. Within the shadows of booming Canary Wharf are the council blocks with the second-highest level of unemployment in London with many families living in relative poverty.
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Household income of 20% of Tower Hamlets residents
These striking contrasting social and economic contexts have something in common. Those working long hours in the skyscrapers and those in poverty could be at risk of personal stress, family strife and knock on psychological difficulties of sleepless nights, depression, anxiety and emotional distress. The BeingWell delivers well-researched and evidence-based mind resilience training – mindfulness. Building resilience is about exercising natural strength while you are well and life is good. This helps resource you when tougher times strike.
BRIDGING DIVIDES
“Tower Hamlets is regarded as an exciting and vibrant place to live. And rightly so. But just as the bars, restaurants and galleries tell one part of the story, so too the pawnbrokers and queues outside the advice agencies tell another. Many feel that the economic activity that centres on Canary Wharf does little to benefit local people in terms of jobs and that the business world could take a great deal more responsibility for the wellbeing of the area in which they are based.“
TOWER HAMLETS FAIRNESS COMMISSION
SHARING PROFITS WITH THE COMMUNITY
The BeingWell contributes to the economy as a business, and we benefit society too by running projects in similar ways to charities. We are sustainable as a business and social enterprise by running high-quality mindfulness programs that individuals, organisations and companies buy as excellent and distinctive products for personal wellbeing and employee health. Then when we do well as a business, society profits.
Founder of the Big Issue, John Bird, narrates this short animation on what a social enterprise is:
CURRENT PROJECT
The BeingWell is proud to be working in partnership with the Oxford University Mindfulness Centre and the East London NHS Foundation Trust. We will be running and evaluating mindfulness groups for mental health patients transitioning from wards to the community.
The project will focus on patients with anxiety and / or depression and will trial Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (CBT) in this hard-to-reach population. We will assess whether MBCT could:
Help mental health patients make an easier transition to primary mental health services from secondary provision.
Promote recovery and psychological progress, not just maintenance, of the patient’s mental health at the time of discharge.
Reduce the likelihood of return to inpatient care in the future. Apart from helping the patient progress psychologically, socially and economically, reducing the demand of high-cost in-patient services could lead to long-term savings for the NHS.