Posted on 10th Sep
Newark-based mental health and wellbeing charity Shawmind has a new chief executive officer.
Peter Wingrove (pictured), who joined the charity in June last year, has been promoted from operations director to the leading role.
The charity said Peter had been the driving force behind a new strategic direction — Shawmind launched its Breathe community outreach programme as well as fundraising and various mental health education projects.
He said: “We had big plans to expand our Breathe outreach services into more communities this year and we were in the process of securing grant funding to enable us to do this when the Covid-19 outbreak led to the nationwide lockdown.
“Thanks to the team and our supporters, we were quickly able to adapt our services so that we were able to continue offering support to the local community, despite having to close our Breathe Café.
“Lockdown provided us with the impetus to open our services to people across the country, using online platforms, in a relatively short space of time.
“During lockdown we developed and began delivering professional mental health training to businesses, teachers and families. I believe that mental health and wellbeing training and support will help us foster a society in which mental health is more openly spoken about and in which we are all more supportive of one another’s wellbeing.”
The charity recently launched its fundraising and awareness campaign, Give Five, Save Lives, aiming to raise the money needed to train teachers in the basics of mental health support.
Adam Shaw, Shawmind founder and chair of the board, said: “I have been really impressed with Peter’s progress as our operations director over the last 14 months.
“His clear passion for cracking the stigma surrounding mental ill health is obvious and his fresh approach to a number of our initiatives and particularly our popular training courses has been a breath of fresh air.”
For more information about Shawmind, go to www.shawmind.org
