Healthy Minds charity can bank on support of Lloyds staff

From left: Martin Roberts of Lloyds Banking Group, Jonny Richardson, Chief Officer, Healthy Minds, Dianne Darby, Healthy Minds Officer and Adele Holdsworth, Healthy Minds Officer

Healthy Minds are Halifax’s only specialist mental health charity and offer a range of services to help people of all ages achieve and maintain good mental health.

Their pilot ‘SafeSpace’ scheme provides somewhere that people can go to for out-of-hours support on weekend evenings. When anyone is experiencing mental distress or approaching crisis, they will now have somewhere to go outside of the usual weekday 9 to 5 traditional support.

What started as a small team of volunteers from the Major Core Programmes Enterprise Transformation team at Lloyds Bank Head have organised a number of fundraising initiatives, which included six sponsored walks in consecutive weekends in May, a member of staff and her local rowing team from Leeds Rowing Club undertaking a 30 mile row in June, three members of staff completing a 10 mile Tough Mudder in July, one member of staff completing a 76 mile walk in The Yorkshire Dales, and a a raffle for a week’s stay in County Mayo, which raised nearly £4,000 with matched funding.

The Lloyds Bank Group Property Division and their external contractors MITIE have helped refurbish Healthy Minds’ new offices with furniture, presentation equipment and new signage.

Brooksbank School have also offered to design a mural which will be displayed in the ’SafeSpace’ area.

Martin Roberts, from Lloyds Banking Group, said: “As the year comes to a close, we are having one final push to try and achieve our £20,000 target to help fund the charities’ activities and we have therefore managed to secure a number of superb raffle prizes with the top prize again being a week’s holiday at a luxurious apartment in Crete.

If you would like to make a donation or for more information regarding the event, visit https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/crete.