Therapeutic Horticulture

Nurturing and tending to an allotment is an extremely social and therapeutic process.

At YMCA Exeter, we are curating spaces to grow and make. This is often a communal process but has huge individual benefits.

Our gardens provide young people with the mental space to reflect and learn about themselves, build a peer-based supportive and positive community, and greatly improve their physical health, general wellbeing and mental health. We find that young people are much more likely to open up about themselves when working alongside their mentor and peers in this way, rather than in a formal desk-based mentoring session.

Growing for Good

Our horticulture and wellbeing project, ‘Growing For Good’ involves seasonally nurturing vegetables and flowers in our community garden. There is well-established evidence that indicates that this approach can address the challenges of anxiety through improving physical health and general wellbeing and this will be the basis of our group discussions. This group is for young people in our supported housing.

Forging Futures

Our blacksmithing and anger management project ‘Forging Futures’ is for young people living in our supported housing projects.

We have recently bought a small forge where we train our residents in making basic metal tools to use they can use in their whittling green woodworking, e.g. hook tools, whittling knives, small axes and adzes. This empowers the residents with the knowledge and the skills to forge their own futures, quite literally! And there is nothing like banging a piece of metal to work out your anger, so we will use this ‘hook’ to integrate our blacksmithing activities with group discussion around Anger and behavioural challenges.

Whittling for Wellbeing

This project for young people living in our supported housing involves learning greenwood working skills like pole lathe tuition, chair making and bowl turning. We believe the immersive nature of this activity will enable residents to work through Low Moods they are experiencing.

Working with green, freshly cut, unseasoned wood outdoors – the traditional way – is a slow, creative, and connected way to make things. Using your hands to create and nurture has so many positive health benefits, both physical and mental.