Ensuring that everyone is fully aware of where their money is being spent is very important to us as we move away from the old ways of working, so we are sorry this has taken so long to put together. We have a very small core team of 7 people that are working on driving projects forward and not enough hours in the day to do all the things we’d like to do (like these updates)!
The best place to start is probably at the beginning so please bear with us as we run through everything that has happened since our inception.
Sowing the Seeds for Community Health Hubs
The People’s Health Alliance (PHA) launched in April 2022 with a grand vision of having an independent, integrated community health hub in every area of the country. Here is a short video series we made as part of our FAQ’s for people new to PHA if you’d like to learn more about setting up a health hub: FAQ Playlist
We, like many others, could see the NHS was crumbling and people were unable to get the support they needed. We saw the need for We, The People, to come together to form local community health hubs that focus on health creation rather than the current healthcare model of ‘a pill for every ill’ and this was the seeding point for PHA.
We started with a tiny budget of about £200 to get a website built and a fantastic team of committed volunteers to help build momentum and rally the troops.
Over the coming months, we did a series of interviews which generated a lot of interest and excitement. New telegram groups started forming across the UK, with people keen to get going in their local area -the full hub list can be found here. (Please note we are in the process of moving everyone across to our new directory which sits alongside the practitioner directory, making it more accessible for people not on telegram).
One of the biggest interviews we did in June 2022 was with Pam Gregory which catapulted PHA internationally far quicker than we ever could have imagined! If you haven’t seen the interview, you can watch it here. It resonated with so many people around the world and seeded the inception point of PHA International, which now includes New Zealand, Australia, USA, Canada, Malta, Portugal and Slovenia – all at varying stages of development.
Your Support is Vital
We launched the Power of the Pound Appeal in June 2022 with the intention of training as many hubs as possible in First Aid when it became increasingly obvious that the pressures on emergency services were at an all time high and not likely to let up!
Thanks to your generous donations, a number of the hubs have been able to train up members of their groups in general first aid as well as the FAB (First Assist Being Well) training that was developed by our Mental Health Ambassador, Helen Gibson and supported by PHA through donations. For more details about the training, please reach out to Helen via her website – anyone affiliated with a hub will receive a hefty discount for the training: https://authenticdiscovery.co.uk/first-assist-beingwell
Other hubs have received support via donations for general set up costs, such as room hire and marketing and advertising campaigns to help spread news of their services locally. One hub has recently written to let us know the money they were given has enabled them to see over 200 people within the last few months and they’ve also built a website which is fantastic.
Further donations have helped to assist in the rebuild and development of My Medical Choice, a Private Members’ Association that provides legal protection for your medical autonomy when you need it most. We have been cooperating closely to build an intuitive and easy-to-use website, which is due for re-launch very soon.
My Medical Choice offers people that rare and valuable thing: peace of mind in troubled times. For more information, visit www.my-medical-choice.org.
Core Operations
Our biggest expense is our core operational costs which we try to keep to an absolute minimum but account for about £4,500 per month, with a large proportion going towards website development and support.
At present, this is largely covered by donations and fundraiser efforts, but we’re currently building other revenue streams with the view to be completely self-sufficient within the next 12 months so that all donations can go directly into supporting local communities.
We shared a public update in December to talk through the achievements to date as well as future projects in the pipeline which you can watch here. Listed below are the key areas we are developing:
Website
New Practitioner Directory with key features:
- Search feature works much quicker
- A more intuitive design for better user experience
- Users can search by location, therapy and practitioner name
- Enhanced features for practitioners
New hub directory with key features:
- Detailed hub description (whatever stage of development)
- Contact details including email, phone, website, social media
- Service provisions (if applicable)
- Request for volunteers
- Link to practitioners on the directory
New website due to launch within the next month with key features:
- Fully optimised search functionality
- Growing library of free health webinars
- Growing library of donation based workshops
- Mental health resource library and directory
- Growing library of blog articles on health related topics
- Hub resource library
Mental Health Project
We had a gala dinner fundraiser in September to raise funds for some key projects surrounding mental health and children/young people. With the incredible support of our PHA network, we managed to raise £20,000 to go directly into these projects and decided to include children and young people within our focus for the mental health project which is currently underway.
This year, we are focussing on building a mental health directory that will signpost people to local low cost and free mental/emotional health support. We will be reaching out to as many community groups and organisations as possible to ensure all areas of the UK are covered.
We will also be building a library of useful articles and webinars that people can utilise freely.
If you know of any organisations or groups that we can get in touch with, please do let us know as this is a huge and vital project.
Hub Resources
The current hub blueprint can be freely downloaded upon newsletter sign up. This will be getting a revamp in 2024 to feature more interviews and short video clips now that we have gained more insights.
This year we will be focusing on providing more support to hubs and those interested in setting one up. This has always been about empowering people to co-create thriving communities and our open source model of sharing information freely will remain in place.
As we learn more about the practicalities of setting up community initiatives, we will be sharing inspiring conversations with those already actively working locally, so their wisdom can be shared with others on the journey.
As we organically grow and evolve, we understand the need for all sectors of community to work collaboratively and cohesively to be truly self-sustaining. This not only involves health and food, but care, education, and local commerce, to name a few. This year, our resource library and hub directory will extend beyond health, as we move towards the creation of The People’s Alliance website, bringing other areas of community under the one umbrella.
If you know of any great community groups that would like to take part in our Community Conversations series, please do let us know as we’d love to share the great things that are already happening, whether that be health related or otherwise.
Health Education
We strongly believe in the need for people to take personal responsibility for their health and our educational offerings reflect this ethos.
We have hosted a range of health-related webinars over the past 18 months, utilising the incredible skills of practitioners and experts in their fields, and will continue to provide this valuable resource, freely. All webinars can be found on our our website here.
Our Wellbeing Wednesday team have been busy creating weekly wellbeing sessions on a Wednesday morning which can be joined live or you can catch up on the recordings here. They offer a range of practical wellness tips and the team are always on the lookout for more people to get involved. These will grow and evolve in the coming months.
Partners and Affiliates
Along with our partnership with My Medical Choice, we will be developing this area further with organisations aligned with our ethos of affordable healthcare for all.
We will be hosting a variety of different donation-based workshops that will focus on a range of health topics such as gut health, holistic dentistry and healing herbs. Our dementia workshop series was very well received and is still available to download here.
All of this has only been made possible with your incredible support, and for that we are truly grateful.
We remain committed to ensuring that everything created is accessible for all and we are very open to receiving ideas about current and future projects. This is very much an organic, people led initiative so your feedback is incredibly important to us.
Please feel free to reach out to the team at info@the-pha.org if you have any feedback or ideas for any of the above mentioned projects.
With much love from
The PHA Team x