Our Story

A SAFE SPACE TO BE ME - EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING HUB·THURSDAY, 22 AUGUST 2019·

A Safe Space to be Me was born in March 2016 and very quickly grew from a very small grass roots community group based in Antrim to one that now has 2 main bases and 5 satellite offices across the Northern Trust locality.Safe Space came about when our Coordinator moved to Crumlin with her family and very quickly realised that Crumlin was lacking in service provision within the community across the board.

After a lot of hard work behind the scenes, sleepless night and very long hours the vision has become reality and in August 2019 we acquired the premises for our Crumlin Community Hub. Our vision is one of inclusivity and togetherness to break down barriers that keep different sections of the community apart, lonely and isolated. We want to promote emotional well-being, engagement of services and family support through a variety of means within the community of Crumlin in a space that is neutral and accessible to all.

A Safe Space to be Me has identified a lack of service provision available to the younger people in the town and felt we could help bridge that gap. With our new project “The hideout” (which regularly attracts 20 children a night and at the time of writing has only been going 3 weeks) younger people can come and avail of our space where we have pool tables, air hockey, games consoles etc (all under supervision) as well as a great space to introduce them to new activities. In addressing this need within Crumlin, we hope to introduce preventative measures as well as bring different generations of the community together, break down barriers of prejudice and isolation, as well as tackling the ongoing issue of anti-social behaviour and connecting with disengaged young people and addressing any further identified needs. We are fortunate to be able to offer out high risk youth intervention programmes with our partner agencies to intervene.

As a grass roots community organisation whose main focus is around mental health and emotional wellbeing , we believe that the work we do with young people will not only be preventative but provide early intervention with a view to developing life skills and resilience and also encourage the individuals to connect and become part of the larger community. A community in which everyone matters.

A big part of the work we do in the community is providing counselling. To date, we have provided nearly 8000 counselling sessions to over 800 clients which is a pnemononal amount having a huge positive impact on the mental health of people in our communities. To allow us to do this we not only provide trainee placements for students in Ulster University but deliver our own counsellor training, ensuring the quality of future counsellors.

We have recently been approved by Ulster University to provide trainee placements for the Bsc. Hons in Youth Work which allow us to continue to run our Hideout programme.

Our hope is to continue to grow in our community and introduce some potentially life changing projects within Crumlin, which will see us tackle mental health issues head on and putting in the preventative work to ensure the next generation has the resilience to cope with anything in life.

Feel free to drop in, have a chat, have a cup of tea, talk about the weather, talk about how your feeling... you matter, i matter, we all matter.