Wirral's independent local news website
‘Colours’ is an initiative of Birkenhead’s ‘Open Door’ charity which provides support and guidance whilst helping people to build resilience so they can tackle the various struggles life may throw up.
Colours is a stress management programme and intends to capture issues at the stage where support at an early opportunity will be beneficial for moving forwards in a positive way.
Lydia Tweed is the Colours Lead for the Open Door charity. She told birkenhead.news, “I think everyone has different interpretations of why we named it ‘Colours’, but some might have said that we bring colour into people’s world when all they see is black and white.”
Lynn Banks is a Wirral based artist who participated in Colours. She told us, “I’ve made a series of paintings about the colour series. I discovered Colours by taking my young person to another piece of therapy.
“While I was there, they said, ‘Would you like to try something?’ and it was the first time in years and years that I’ve talked about the impact it had on me and it was really nice to have a mentor that understood.”
Lydia continued, “I think that really resonates with Lynn and her paintings and the impact that Colours has had on her but also the impacts that Colours can have on anyone that partakes.”
Explaining the reach of the Colours programme, Lydia said, “The interesting thing about stress is that stress is universal. And it’s not something that we’ve talked about enough and which is why Colours is open to anyone over the age of 18.”
Colours is essentially used as a prevention programme, but a lot of the time, the team see people enter the Colours programme who are already very stressed. The team provide the tools people need to deal with their own stress and empower them to make time for themselves and get the support that they need.
Of the support she received, Lynn told us, “I didn’t have to begin at the beginning. I could just begin by talking about me. And the process kind of guided me through tools that I obviously had, I just didn’t see them because I was so overwhelmed with the bigger picture of worry, fear and anxiety.”
“It had an absolutely massive effect on me. It gave me permission to be me. It enabled me to embed the thinking and the reflection and the mindfulness and a timeout. It kinda gave me back to me.”
If you’re interested in signing up to the Colours programme, or if you’d like to know more about becoming a mentor and delivering Colours to others, please contact Lydia at lydia@opendoorcharity.com
Image: (L-R) Lynn Banks and Colours Lead, Lydia Tweed in front of Lynn’s artwork
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