Formative poster, the first one

1. Clothes, Coffee, Cake and Chat
A Clothes and toys swap community project
Nicola Endicott email address: n.e102@canterbury.ac.uk
Victoria Ball email address: v.b214@canterbury.ac.uk
Agnieszka Niec email address: a.niec837@canterbury.ac.uk
Toby Lambert email address: t.lambert258@canterbury.ac.uk
Our idea for the community project consists of a meeting place for parents to come together and meet other parents
(Coram, 2019), share a coffee and a cake and to donate/take clothing and toys. We are targeting mainly mothers and care
givers of children who are on low incomes and who might be suffering with isolation. Our goal is to create a space of
sharing and connection for the parents of Aylesham, combined with the opportunity to obtain free children’s clothing and
toys.
REFERENCES:
Christiansen, CH., Baum, C., Bass, J. (2015) Occupational Therapy: Performance, Participation and Well-Being, Fourth Edition, p58 Thorofare, NJ: SLACK Incorporated.
Coram (2019), Loneliness among parents is common but the solutions are out there | Family and Childcare Trust. Avaluable at : www. Over half of parents with young children feel lonely, with those on
lowest incomes twice as likely to be affected | Coram
City Population (2020), Available At: http://citypopulation.de/en/uk/southeastengland/kent/E34002033__aylesham/ Accessed: 06 October 202
Home-Start (2021), Report: Home is where we start from, Available at: https://www.home-start.org.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=1cb9d1b2-6253-478e-a939-db5d8e06899d Accessed: 06 October 2022.
Kent-Marvick, J. (2020) 'Loneliness in pregnant and post-partum and parents of children under 5', A scoping review protocol, September 14, or P.213
https://systematicreviewsjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13643-020-01469-5.
Kronenberg,F., Pollard,N., Sakellariou, D. (2011) Occupational Therapies without Borders, Churchill Livingstone Elsevier: Edinburgh.
Little Village, (2022), Over one million babies and young children living in poverty according to new report - Little Village (littlevillagehq.org) Accessed: 06 October 2022
We have two key areas that we would like to help alleviate for our community project. They are; loneliness and low-income
families.
75% of parents surveyed by home start stated that their biggest challenge was feeling isolated and cut off from their family and
friends. (Home-Start, 2021) We also have experience within our group of how isolating it can be when you become a new parent
and how important making new friendships with people who are going through similar experiences can be.
The cost-of-living crisis as it has been coined is a very scary reality for so many people right now. The heightened cost of living we
are experiencing now, and the future rises predicted places huge financial pressures on families. 4.5 million children are living in
poverty, a rise of 5% since before the pandemic. (Little village 2022) .
We hope to increase the wellbeing of parents that attend our community project by having a space to meet other parents and
services within the village (Kronenberg and Sakellariou, 2011). The clothes swap will hopefully alleviate financial difficulties at an
already financially difficult time to get some clothes and toys for their children over the festive season.
Our plan for the community project is to hold our event In a church hall in Aylesham, a village in Kent situated between Canterbury
and Dover. One member of the group lives there has good links to services and individuals that will be valuable to us. Aylesham is
an old mining town at heart. In more recent years it has had a surge of population growth owed to the new build development
there (City population, 2020). With the governments help to buy scheme a lot of residents of the new builds are younger families.
We hope to hold this in the morning for a few hours. We will have refreshments, cakes and an area to sit down for the parents to
connect with each other. Toys supplied by the church will be around for the children to play with. There will be an area that has
tables and rails that will have an organised array of donated children’s clothing and toys. Anything left behind can be donated to a
charity shop.
We hope to work with the church hall within the village that currently offers a baby group. We have researched a Facebook group
called The Magic Wardrobe which holds a similar idea in Whitstable, offering free children’s clothes that we would like to
collaborate with.
We plan to evaluate the outcome of the event with questionnaires, feedback forms and a sticker board to ask participants if they
would like to come to this event again in the future. Alongside this we will ask for feedback from the organisations we worked
with.
We feel the model best suited to our community project is Christiansen and
Baum’s PEOP. We’ve added an image of this model to the right of this text to
show what it encompasses.
According to Bass, Baum and Christiansen (2015), this model is designed to
support practitioners to work with the individuals and the community.
Taking into account:​
PERSON - in our case a group of parents or child carers,
ENVIRONMENT – Aylesham, where there is a large group of people with
young children,
OCCUPATION - active participation of parents, guardians of children in this
event, integration with other parents, exchange of clothes, toys and
maternal and paternal experiences
PERFORMANCE - we will organize this event and we will give them the
opportunity to further organise more, they will be able to continue to this
event.
Person-Environment-Occupation-Performance (PEOP) model. Person Environment Model of
Occupational Therapy (slideshare.net)