Have you checked out our lovely Advent Calendar yet? Throughout December we’re sending you a Christmassy mindapple a day. Follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook to get the updates, and you can subscribe on our new Mindapple-a-day feed too.
Here’s a selection of the best so far…
Yes it's cold but we don't care
Spread the love...
Go on, treat yourself
There’s been a “Back to School” feel here at Mindapples HQ recently, because we’ve finally finished our roadtrip to the summer festivals bringing Mindapples to the masses. It’s been amazing fun and it’s been particularly nice hearing all the wonderfil suggestions and feedback from people at festivals the length and breadth of the country.
Mindapples at the Wilderness Festival 2011
Our summer campaign was funded by Mind as part of the Time to Change campaign. The good folks there felt that our “5-a-day for your mind” approach was effective for starting positive conversations about mental health, and particularly to promote conversations between people with and without experiences of mental illness. Since we were planning to take Mindapples to summer music festivals anyway, we were very happy to help, and thanks very much to Mind for funding us to deliver a bigger and better summer campaign than we’d ever have managed on our own.
We were at six festivals over the summer: Larmer Tree, Secret Garden Party, Camp Bestival, The Big Chill, Wilderness and Thames Festival. We ran our own tents at SGP and Wilderness, and at Thames Festival we had a little forest of Mindapples trees by Tower Bridge. The new Mindapples trees, designed by Helena Ambrosio, have looked absolutely beautiful, and we even got filmed by Paul Merton at the Big Chill!
Harvesting mindapples is hard work...
Over these six festivals we’ve harvested a whopping 7899 new mindapples, which means we’ve reached thousands more people with our campaign and collected a huge basket (well, six big bags) of new suggestions to add to our site. If you were there, nice to meet you, thank you for sharing, and we’ll be posting photos and videos soon once we’ve found all our belongings in the chaos.
Big, big thanks to Jenny Reina, also of Hunter Gatherers, for leading our campaign this summer, and also particularly to Laura Billings too for leading three of the festivals. And of course a huge thanks to all the Mindapples Gardeners for volunteering and giving out applecards in wind, rain and sunshine, we really couldn’t do this work without you.
We’re celebrating the end of the festivals season with our fantastic fundraiser Feed Your Head on Thursday 13th October, so see you all then I hope, and in the meantime, keep watering those mindapples…
What's all this then...?
Posted by Andy
Photo: Barry Lewis, via Thames Festival
This summer, Mindapples has been touring the country at a host of music festivals, including Secret Garden Party, Wilderness and the Big Chill. We’ve met lots of amazing people, perhaps including you, and had a lot of fun in the fields. More on that next week when we start to round up all our activities. But first, we’re coming home, and celebrating our return with a bang.
This weekend, 10-11th September 2011, Mindapples will be featuring in the Mayor of London’s annual celebration of outdoor arts and fun, the Thames Festival. In their own words, this is “a spectacular event, free to all, which brings together Londoners of all ages and from all communities to celebrate their city and the River Thames. The festival commissions new work, and transforms outdoor spaces on and around the River Thames with a mixture of music, dancing, street arts, river races, carnival, pyrotechnics, art installations, massed choirs, food and feasting.”
We’re very excited to be featured in this fantastic event, so please come and say hello! We will have a little grotto of Mindapples trees, in the market area by City Hall, overlooking the river. We’ll be there from noon until 10pm Saturday and Sunday, and if you come on Sunday evening you’ll have a lovely spot to watch the finale, “a magical illuminated Night Carnival that winds along the south and north banks of the Thames, followed by a fireworks display fired from the centre of the river itself.” Oooh.
Hope to see you there, and we’ll post more next week about all our festival adventures – and a special surprise event next month too. Watch this space…
Posted by Andy
Jenny and half the Mindapples festivals team is at Larmer Tree this weekend to kick off our summer festivals programme for 2011. If you aren’t lucky enough to be there this weekend though, you don’t have to miss out – come to the Lambeth Country Show!
Laura, Ruta and I will be flying the Mindapples flag today at this free festival in south London. Now in its 37th year, the Lambeth Country Show brings country fair style entertainment to London, with “live music, storytelling, fairground rides, farm animals and plenty of games for everyone to join in” (it says here). Apparently they’re turning Brockwell Park into a little piece of the countryside for the weekend, and we couldn’t resist the invitation to take the Mindapples Tree down there to plant a few seeds in the minds of Lambeth folks.
We’ll be there all day today, so please come along and say hello. We’ll be in position 103, wherever that is, somewhere near our friends at SLaM NHS and also NHS South East London. Details below. Hope to see you there!
When: 16 July 2011 – 17 July 2011, 11am – 7pm
Where: Brockwell Park
Nearest Tube: Herne Hill
Cost: Free
Age Restrictions: none
Posted by Andy
The time has come again to get the mindapples tree back on the road and come and meet all of you wonderful people. Yes, it’s the festival season!
We feel very lucky to have been invited back to the four fantastic festivals we visited last year, as well as some exciting new ones too. Here’s where we’ll be over the next couple of months:
Larmer Tree Festival: 13th -17th of July
A 5-day fun packed affair with music, comedy and whole variety of workshops at the border of Wiltshire and Dorset. A new addition to the Mindapples itinerary, we’re excited about starting off our festival season at the Larmer Tree Festival.
Secret Garden Party: 21st – 24th of July
Our flagship event. After a great success last year, we’re very pleased to be coming back to the Secret Garden Party – and this time running our own Mindapples Tent. Come and find us near Centre Camp and relax under the Mindapples Tree with a whole load of fun ways to feed your head from our friends and collaborators.
Camp Bestival: 28th – 31st of July
So who’s coming to Camp Bestival? We sure are. It will be another great year of music, comedy and overall fun. Set by the stunning Lulworth Castle, we can’t wait to see everyone’s fancy dress and have a giggle.
The Big Chill: 5th – 7th of August
With an impressive line-up this year with the likes of Kanye West and the Chemical Brothers, we’re looking forward to returning and meeting all you lovely people under our new tree. Come say hello between the acts, and in the meantime check out their Spotify playlist.
Playgroup Festival: 5th – 7th August
Small but perfectly formed, we can’t wait to head back to Brighton for this year’s Playgroup Festival. Not only will there be live music, but also all sorts of games and activities, cabaret acts, installation art – and even magic!
Wilderness Festival: 12th – 14th August
From the organisers of Secret Garden Party, we’ve been invited to run a tent at the brand new Wilderness festival in beautiful Oxfordshire. Celebrating the great outdoors, it will have lots to offer – from live music, fine dining to literary arts. It will even have a wilderness spa for ultimate relaxation – definitely a mindapple.
Thames Festival: 10th – 11th September
To wrap it all up, we’re returning home to London for this year’s Thames Festival. We’ll be by the river under our various battle-hardened Mindapples Trees, so come say hi! It’s all free of charge so do come by to enjoy the art and entertainment and celebrate the city with fellow Londoners.
So there we have it, our festival plans for the summer. Needless to say, we’re looking forward to it, but most of all we can’t wait to meet those of you who can make it and have a chat about what you think is good for your mind. Come and say hello, share your mindapples, and we’ll also have various types of entertainment and a whole bunch of giveaways to share with you. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed for good weather so we can lounge around under our tree in the sunshine and enjoy our mindapples.
Hope to see you there, happy festival season!
Posted by Ruta
March has been a very busy month for Mindapples, what with moving into our new offices at Somerset House, getting production underway with our Lambeth GP surgeries project, and engaging in the various discussions in Government around the Public Health White Paper and other key key policy announcements.
Those of you who follow us on Twitter might have spotted the best news this month though, which is that Mindapples has just won two innovation challenge prizes from the Cabinet Office Innovation Hub! The prizes, which were judged by the NHS National Innovation Centre, were awarded as follows:
The money will be put towards some vital infrastructure work for us, including helping to improve our website and also help us get our office set up. More important than the money though is that this represents our first official endorsement from Central Government for the work we’ve been doing at Mindapples. We’ll be continuing the conversation with both the Cabinet Office and the NHS to work with them to promote public mental health in the UK and hopefully secure some further investment to help us scale up our efforts.
Huge thanks to Sandie Bakowski and all the staff at the Innovation Hub’s DotGovLabs team. Mindapples and I really appreciate all that you’re doing to promote innovation in public services and get our ideas the voice they need to make real change. And thanks to you all, as always, for supporting Mindapples and helping us grow.
Posted by Andy
As someone who has taken an interest in the growth and development of Mindapples over 2010, I thought you might appreciate a little update on where we’ve got to and where we’re headed!
As I announced earlier this week, we now have a confirmed grant from Guys and St Thomas’s Charity to pilot Mindapples with GP surgeries across Lambeth. We will be installing Mindapples materials in four Lambeth GP practices to begin with, and asking the staff and patients of each practice to share their Mindapples via the installations. Mindapples will then be analysing the responses and helping the practices design simple ways to support the wellbeing of their staff and patients, and we’ll also then do follow-up marketing and digital engagement services.The project will be evaluated by the Institute of Psychiatry and Kings College London to give us a core evidence base to show to other funders and NHS organisations, particularly with a view to selling services to the new GP consortia when they’re established in 2011. We’re looking to recruit some volunteers and interns to help with this project, so if you think you have something to bring please e-mail iseehealthypeople@mindapples.org
In the past six months, the Mindapples Tree has travelled to the Future Gallery in London, the Secret Garden Party, Camp Bestival, the Big Chill, the Playgroup Festival, Brixton Market, Millwall FC and the NHS Confederation Mental Wellbeing Conference. Over the summer we have harvested over 1255 mindapples, including 444 from the Secret Garden Party postboxes and tree combo alone. I’m particularly pleased with our Brixton Market event, in which we popped up one Saturday and successfully engaged 170 total strangers in sharing their mindapples in just three hours. There are also lots and lots of photos online now on our new Flickr page. Thanks to everyone who volunteered to help out, particularly Hege for the Big Treat, Jenny and Lucy for the festivals campaign, and Esther for all the recent conferences and pop-ups.
Big thanks also to Lucy for doing the evaluation on all this for us, and if you’d like a copy of the evaluation report please e-mail ilovestatsmmmmlovely@mindapples.org.
The People Speak have made this great video of our Brixton Market event. Please do send it on!
Thanks to many people and to Esther, Mandeep, Amanda, Christine and Tessy in particular, we have also submitted a large bid to the Maudsley Charity for core funding and product development, and will be applying for various other charitable grants in early 2011 using the evidence base we’ve collected over the summer. Fundraising has been slow though, mainly because of our lack of core resources, so we’re looking for help in this area urgently. There’s a lot we don’t know in this area and I’m sure we could be doing more. Any help you can offer with our next round of funding bids would be amazing. Please e-mail iknowhowtogetmoney@mindapples.org
We have been developing a range of products to sell to commercial and healthcare clients for a while now, and we are finally making some headway. Focussing at this stage on engagement services, particularly workshops, digital tools and promotional materials, we are getting a lot of enquiries and now some sales for workshops and installations to commercial and charitable clients. We are hoping to grow this workshop business in 2011 and then offer our clients higher value services that deliver deeper wellbeing outcomes, including digital subscription services and offering Big Treat events for staff in large workplaces. Of course there’s a lot more to do here, but we’re definitely making good progress, and we are confident now that there is a market for what we do. For more information on our products and services, please e-mail buyingthingsmakesmehappy@mindapples.org.
We’ve been something of a hit at conferences and with the wider policy community recently. Huge thanks to Marjorie for her great efforts promoting us at the Tory and LibDem Conferences, and I’ve also spoken at the Guardian Social Care Conference, the NHS Confederation Mental Wellbeing Conference, the SLaM NHS Wellbeing Conference, the Robertson Cooper Business Wellbeing Network Conference and also various social innovation events and meetups. At the Business Wellbeing Conference, we were on the same bill as Lord Richard Layard, and the Mindapples session was voted the most popular of the day by the 100+ delegates, a staggering 4.76 out of 5! Thanks to Tony, Lucy, Gregor, Nicola, Ravi and others, we’re also becoming increasingly known within the NHS and the policy community, and have been consulted on the various White Papers emerging from the new Government. Tessy and I are now hoping to build on this by writing a policy pamphlet about the innovative Mindapples engagement methodology. If anyone would like to help us by doing some research into mental health promotion policy for this pamphlet, drop us a line at mylittlepolicywonk@mindapples.org.
Back in the Summer, we received a Better Net Award from UnLtd and Nominet Trust to redevelop our website, and huge thanks to Hege, Rose, Victoria and Analia for all their help with that. The new site was built by Unboxed Consulting, Sangeet and Tom, and thanks to Hege and Gavin for their help too back in July. It’s basic, but it’s a great starting point and we’re consistently getting a few signups a day without any promotion. We’ll promote it more heavily once we’ve got the next version up, which will include Networks functionality to allow organisations to have their own mini-mindapples survey and community, and also various follow-up engagement tools. If anyone would like to help me test the next version of the website, please e-mail me at makemeataster@mindapples.org.
We founded Mindapples as a non-profit Company Limited by Guarantee in May 2010, with myself, Tessy and Hege as the initial guarantors. Thanks to Nicola and Esther we are now properly set up with good accounting processes, VAT registration and all those other grown up things. We have also been slowly professionalising the organisation, with things like IP licensing and confidentiality agreements and the beginnings of contracts for staff and volunteers. I think we are in good shape for the coming year of expansion, although obviously there’s always more to do in this area. I’ll make sure we share as many of our models as we can to help other start-ups. Thanks very much to Louise for her support and constant favour-pulling to get us the advice we’ve needed in this area. We definitely need more help with our communications next year, so if you can help us send updates to the Gardeners and our wider community, please contact meandmybigmouth@mindapples.org.
As you can see, it’s been a very busy year and many people have contributed to our successes in 2010. I’d particularly like to thank Hege, who worked tirelessly on the Big Treat earlier in the year and has now gone on to found her own project, All We Need; Esther, who has taken on all our operational management in recent months and is doing amazing work turning us into a Proper Organisation, Amanda, Jenny and Lucy for all their great work at our events and writing such great reports, and particularly to Tessy for working a lot harder than people realise behind the scenes, keeping me (mostly) sane and quietly pushing things in the right direction at all times. I remain really proud and privileged to have so many talented and enthusiastic people helping me to make Mindapples a success, including all of you out there in our extended online family. THANK YOU ALL for your hard work, support, advice, and most of all for believing in this project. 2011 is going to be a very good year.
A very happy Christmas to you all.
Andy x
In October 2010, Mindapples teamed up with NHS Lambeth and the nice people at Spacemakers and Transition Town Brixton, to install a pop-up Mindapples Tree in Brixton Village Market and talk to complete strangers about the health of their minds. We had no plan, no permission, and no idea what would happen. So, we asked The People Speak to come down and film the day and make a little video of what happened. Here’s the result…
Thanks to Hektor and Rick for the brilliant video, and to Esther, Jenny and Sahar for collecting Mindapples on the day! If you’d like Mindapples to come to your town, please e-mail pleasedomenext@mindapples.org.
Posted by Andy
Hello folks, and a very happy World Mental Health Day to you all!
To celebrate, Mindapples have been on tour around London, beginning in Brixton on Thursday and Saturday, and culminating in installing the Mindapples Tree at CityCamp London in the Hub King Cross today. It’s been an amazing few days, stepping far out of our comfort zone to get as broad a rane of people as we could in considering the health of their minds. Huge thanks to Lucy Smith at NHS Lambeth for hiring us, to Spacemakers and Transition Town Brixton for hosting us yesterday, and to Futuregov and the gang at CityCamp for welcoming us today.
For two years now, Mindapples hasn’t done anything for World Mental Health Day. Yes, it’s partly because we’re disorganised, but it’s also because, frankly, we don’t feel a great affinity with it. Let’s face it, today is actually World Mental Illness Day. It’s really important for us to honour and support people who suffer from mental distress and those who care for them – but is it really Mental Health Day? If it was, surely we should be promoting the positive things that we all want to have – a healthy mind, a positive experience of life – and giving people a really strong image of a mentally healthy lifestyle they can be a part of? 40% of our mental wellbeing is down to our “outlook and activities” (according to Lykken, D, 1999), so why are we never told that? Why aren’t we talking about that today? Where do we fit, as individuals and as a society, in this world of “mental health”?
So on 10/10/10, Mindapples is asking everyone to join us in making this World Mental Health Day about health, not illness. Please comment here and share your stories about what you’ve done and how you’ve felt when your mind is really feeling good, and share your mindapples to get as many people as possible talking about mental health as a good thing, that we can all be a part of.
We all have minds, and we all have mental health; so let’s celebrate how well we’re all doing, and remind ourselves how similar we all are for once.
Happy Mindapples Day everyone!
Posted by Andy
We’re very pleased to announce that we’re now working with NHS Lambeth to engage new audiences in mental health and wellbeing. Come and join us for a screening of Mississippi Damned at the Ritzy Cinema at 6:15 on Thursday 7th October, where we’ll be promoting Mindapples as part of the Brixton Reel film festival.
The Mindapples Tree (well, something resembling it) will be planted in the Ritzy for you all to play with, and we’ll also have a stack of fun stuff and Mindapples merchandise to give out to visitors. Come early for a carribean buffet at 5pm, and then stick around for a free charity screening of this award-winning movie. Call 0871 704 2065 to book tickets now.
After that we’ll be taking the Mindapples Tree to visit our friends in Brixton Village Market on Saturday 9th October for a day of hanging out collecting mindapples from the locals and probably eating too much carribean food. (Note the change of day!!!)
And on Sunday, to celebrate World Mental Health Day, we’ll be at the Hub Kings Cross for City Camp London, asking what London needs to be mentally healthy. Please come and visit us there, and the tree might also stick around in the Hub for the rest of the week too.
You can see the full flyer for the Brixton Reel film festival below. We really hope you can join us!
Mindapples on Twitter
