Sheffield Flourish supports people living with or affected by mental ill health to use their skills, ideas and talents to build the lives they wish to lead, through creative, mental-health friendly activities, coproduction and digital tools.
We run open-access, free community enterprises offering involvement in writing, horticulture, theatre, art, music and football. You can see our latest community enterprises and groups by clicking here.
On the digital side, we run four websites; the Sheffield Flourish hub has over 300 mental health stories, two web directories, the Sheffield Mental Health Guide and Sheffield Suicide Support and Prevention, and the My Toolkit platform, where you can plan activities to support your mental health.
Our background story
The charity grew out of Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust (SHSC) in 2012, founded by a group of people with a shared drive to make a difference to mental health support in Sheffield. Some had their own experience of mental health issues, while others had spent their lives working in the field.
SHSC were running a number of recovery-focused activities including Oasis, a mental health friendly vegetable growing group, and CAST, a very busy art group. ‘Recovery Enterprises’ (our former name) was officially launched as a way of ‘doing things differently’ in mental health care, with the ambition to support community enterprises.
In Sheffield around 95,000 people are diagnosed with depression or anxiety, and over 5,000 with severe mental illness (Public Health Sheffield). We believe supporting the mental health of our communities falls beyond the reach of the NHS as there are multiple and individual experiences of mental health. However, feelings of social isolation, uselessness and difficulty self-managing are very common, and these are the needs Sheffield Flourish aims to address.