Our courses provide a safe, supportive, and compassionate approach to mental health recovery. We empower, educate, and offer tools to help individuals navigate their journey while learning from others with similar experiences. They are delivered with lived and learned experience of mental health and wellbeing.
Our sessions cover a range of topics, promoting:
Courses are grouped to guide students through their recovery:
CHIME is a framework for personal recovery.
In the research which led to the creation of CHIME different stories of personal recovery were compared. It was found that there were five things that everyone had in common which helped their recovery.
They were Connection, Hope, Identity, Meaning and Empowerment.
These are a list of actions which can be done to support a person’s wellbeing.
The 5 ways to wellbeing are:
We develop and deliver all our courses in a partnership process called co-production.
We do this with people who have lived experience of mental health challenges, and with mental health clinicians.
But, it is not only our courses that are co-produced. Everyone at Recovery College has the opportunity to contribute to decisions we make.
Students choose whether they want to attend Recovery College.
Students are free to take part as much or as little as they want during courses. We encourage students to gain knowledge, skills and strategies. It is not a formal environment and there are no tests.
Students choose which courses they would like to take.
If students have particular goals, we can support them in choosing the best courses to meet them.
We are all students.
We recognise that each student has skills, knowledge, strengths and unique experience that is beneficial to the learning environment of all.
Our aim is support and empower.
We want students to achieve their recovery goals and feel empowered to take on a life and opportunities outside of services.
Building partnerships with community organisations is important to us.
We value the existing partnerships we have across Norfolk and Suffolk. And we are grateful for the support, service and benefit to students they provide.
There are no formal requirements, criteria or risk assessments required to attend.
We encourage students to tell us what works best for them so that we can do our best to provide the right support.
The quality of our co-produced courses is very important to us. We follow the Coproduction Guidance [pdf] 287KB
Our Quality Panel examines each course against specific quality criteria before it reaches the timetable, checking that each course is recovery focused and evidence based. The panel consists of people who have either lived or learned experience, from either inside and outside the college.
