Myplace Weeknotes: Week 3

Furthermore and the Myplace team at the Lancashire Wildlife Trust, have embarked on a new project with support from Catalyst and National Lottery funding.

Myplace is a green prescribing initiative run by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust which aims to increase mental wellbeing through connecting clients to the natural environment in a group setting. It is predicted that due to COVID-19, almost 20% of the population will need either new or additional mental health support making initiatives like Myplace essential in supporting community mental health provision.

The aim of the current project is to increase the number of people who move from initial enquiry or referral to actually joining Myplace and experiencing the benefits of connecting with nature via ecotherapy.

To share our journey with others we’ll be drafting weeknotes describing and reflecting on our work over the past week:

• Week 1
• Week 2

What we got up to this week:

• We did a lot of listening this week as we spoke to a variety of prospective service users who had signed up for Myplace but hadn’t yet attended a session. The content of these conversations emphasised to us that our service users have varying needs and there is no one size fits all solution
• We were moved by people’s stories and resilience in the face of their mental health difficulties and empathised by sharing our own experiences. We laughed with our research respondents and we chatted to dogs over zoom like *Miranda’s Jack Russell, *Billie

We enjoyed chatting to our service users and their pets, like Miranda’s Jack Russell Billie who looks a bit like this. Reproduced with a creative commons licence

• We rose to the challenge of adapting to the challenges posed by carrying out research with individuals with varying levels of digital connectivity and are considering how this will impact our prototype
• We also spoke to green prescribers who have a vital role in the community in terms of referring and signposting prospective service users to Myplace. It was fascinating to learn how many had adapted to the challenges posed by social distancing and we were humbled to hear their stories

We created empathy maps using our research to put ourselves in the shoes of one of our users. Christine, a mum of three teenagers mourning the loss of her mum is one fictional persona we created

• Learning about how Macmillan has also implemented an online self-referral system for their coaching service also gave us valuable learnings in terms of what challenges we may face in the testing phase
• At the end of the week we hosted an online workshop with the Myplace team and gathered all of our research findings affinity mapping key quotes and observations, clustering these for prominent themes. We formed empathy maps and personas and created a customer journey map for these personas charting pain points, hopes, dreams and emotions
• The Myplace team said: It’s been fascinating to step back and see someone else unpick challenges we’ve wrestled with for years. Sometimes confirming our thoughts, sometimes challenging them.

*Names have been changed