Kirsty Greer on taking the time to connect
All of us can sometimes feel blue, and all of us have times when we feel alone or unheard.
At the same time, the stigma around mental health and emotional vulnerability can make us afraid to reach out. That’s why it’s so important to actively make space to talk to each other about how we’re doing, and reach out to each other.
One great way to do that is to hold a Blue Cake Day. We’ve been encouraging our supporters for years to hold these events.
On the surface, a Blue Cake Day is a bake sale – we invite people to bring some sweet treats, homemade or shop-bought, which are blue (or blueish) to sell, with the proceeds going to help provide person-centred support for people struggling with their mental health. But Blue Cake Days aren’t just fundraisers – they’re an opportunity to open up the conversation around mental health, speak to our friends and colleagues about what’s happening with us, and share tools and ideas for looking after ourselves.
Especially for those of us working in the third sector, it’s often easier to talk about other people’s mental health than our own. We can be super trauma-informed, open and compassionate in how we speak to people involved in our work, but we might not extend the same compassion to ourselves as third sector workers.
At Health in Mind, we had a Blue Cake Day in our Edinburgh office this week, and we used some of the tools we give out in all our Blue Cake Day packs – games, conversation-starters, and our Wellbeing Wall exercise. It was a really great opportunity to have a blether with people I’d worked with for ages but never really talked to, and it opened up some conversations we’d never have had over lunch or in the office.
If we’d said to people, "come and talk about your wellbeing", I think there’d have been some eyerolling and a lot of ‘but I’ve got too much to do’. And that’s at an organisation where mental health and wellbeing is the heart of our work. The great thing about something like Blue Cake Day is that little sweetener (literally) – it’s much easier to come together over cake and a cuppa than to sit in a room of your colleagues and say ‘right, let’s talk about our feelings’.
For a lot of people, Blue Cake Days give them a chance to feel safe enough to talk, in a boundaried way, without the pressure to be vulnerable. We discussed things like tools that help different people manage their wellbeing, and what we can do to lift ourselves up after a hard day. Even for people who don’t want to engage with the conversation, it’s a way to carve out time to be around each other and connect for a wee while – and if you get nothing else from it, some of the cakes people brought in were enough to lift my mood on their own!
What I have been thinking about as we were planning our own Blue Cake Day is: whether it’s this or another kind of event, it’s really important that we can all take the time to connect with the people around us. In the third sector, the work we do often feels too urgent and important to take a moment to check in with ourselves and each other. This week, we took a couple of hours just to connect over cake and biscuits, and I’m still feeling the impacts from that.
If you want to look into setting up a Blue Cake Day in your own workplace, get in touch with fundraising@health-in-mind.org.uk, or check out https://health-in-mind.org.uk/event/blue-cake-day/ for more information.
Kirsty Greer is community and events fundraiser for Health In Mind.
