Supporting Children like Lylie-Mae

Here at the Southmead Development Trust’s children’s social prescribing service, Link Forward, we work with partners to provide activities to support children’s wellbeing.

We love to work with Farm Hands, in Shirehampton, who offer volunteering opportunities to 8-11 year-olds living in Lawrence Weston, Shirehampton, Sea Mills or Avonmouth.  Activities include mucking out, handling and feeding animals, gardening, crafts, making new friends, working hard and having fun!

I’d like to introduce you to Lylie-Mae, who we met through Link Forward, and has written about their experience with Farm Hands.

My name is Lylie-Mae and I worked at Farm Hands. This was a really fun place to go every Sunday as sometimes you can be bored and then think I have farm hands today, yay!

I really like all the animals and people there. As it is an amazing place to go to. If you would like to support them in any way you could work there as a kid or teenager or you could donate a bit of money if possible.

I really recommend joining if you love animals as much as me! If you do join it can take a while but mine only took 2 weeks as the list can go down very quickly and can go up quickly too.

There is so many lovely people and animals and if you are lucky you might get to see some babies because there are now baby goats and chickens (chicks).

Some of my school even went there but I also met new people and some of them turned into my best friends. So you might have a chance of some of your school going there too.

It lasts 2 hours and don’t worry if you feel like you’ll get tired in between because you have time for a break and snack and you can bring your own if you would like.

It was honestly the best experience ever! I definitely recommend to everyone. If I could rate it out of 10, it would definitely be a 10! So if you love animals definitely join Lawrence Weston Farm Hands!”

Thank you Lylie-Mae for this brilliant write up.  We hope that it will encourage other children to write and share their own exciting experiences.

This summer Link Forward will be offering a holiday programme to support children – Resilience Lab – dates below.  We’ll be adding more info to our website soon, but meanwhile just email us or call (ask for the Link Forward team) if you’d like to find out more or would like to register for a place.

Tuesdays, 2-3pm, at the Greenway Centre

• 25th July: Pressure Proof
• 1st August: Making Friends with Stress
• 8th August: Thinking Traps
• 15th August: Strengths
• 22nd August: Endings
• 29th August: New Beginnings

Read all about Link Forward HERE

Contact us:

email: info@southmead.org, tel: 0117 950 3335, or go to our website: www.southmead.org