Our Celebration

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History of Our Celebration

Our organisation started off in 1985 in the home of our founder, Emmy Burdon.

In those days, people living with a severe mental illness often spent time in hospital to get well, only to be discharged into the community with very little to keep them occupied or motivated. This is long before we had started to talk about ‘Recovery and integration' - indeed, many of the long stay institutions were still open and the focus of attention was primarily on dealing with the clinical symptoms of mental illness, rather than the prevention and coping strategies that we take for granted today.

After seeing this cycle of hospital treatment / discharge / isolation / relapse and back into hospital happen so many times, Emmy decided to start a support group in her own home that would give people some routine, a purpose, and importantly, a chance to socialise and be with other people.

In the early days, the group focussed mainly on making things that could be sold - Christmas crackers and needlecraft items - it was a simple idea but it worked! With this initial success, Emmy and her supporters worked determinedly to develop the organisation further, to influence local priorities and provide a safety net for some of the most excluded and vulnerable people within our community.  Over the years they secured contracts with a variety of funders, developed a learning and mentoring programme and expanded on our original client base of those living with schizophrenia, to include people recovering from a whole variety of mental illnesses. In 1997, after much hard work a grant was secured from the National Lottery that allowed the erection of our own purpose-built premises, giving us some security for the future and allowing us to develop our ability to help even futher.

The development of the 'Recovery Model' for mental health over the past few years has led to significant change in how many mental health services are set up and structured. With the support of our funders and stakeholders we have succesfully managed this change from providing 'dayservice' type activity to 'recovery-focussed' projects and are now well placed to face the future with a clear vision of what we want to achieve.

The one thing that has kept us fairly unique in our area over the years is that we have kept our focus primarily on those with enduring mental ill-health and also made sure that the needs of the individual have always stayed paramount.

Often people wonder about our name as its quite unusual and wonder where it came from - Well, the story is that in the early days of the charity it was just known is ‘the club' or ‘the group' but the people coming along wanted to have something a bit more positive to call themselves - they wanted a name they could be proud, one that was distinct and also one that showed everybody that mental ill-health wasn't all negative, doom and gloom - they wanted an optimistic name and after much thought they came up with Our Celebration and even after all these years its still a name that captures some of the energy and positivity that can come out of overcoming a difficult situation.