What the mentors say - Achievements - Upstream

What the Upstream mentors say

• ‘As a mentor, I think that hope is a very important ingredient. We need to sustain hope in our participants.’
  
• ‘People put up barriers – transport, time, routines that are set in stone, mobility. People don’t like being a problem to anyone. It takes time to reassure people and to show them how we can get round these problems. People have to trust us that we are meeting them on equal terms.’
• ‘The thing that we can attempt to do is to give people back their independence, whereas other agencies may, by the way they are structured, encourage dependence. We can play a vital role in assisting people towards greater confidence, ideas of value and self-worth, but sustainability is the key.’
• ‘Sometimes a relatively short spell of creativity may give people enough confidence and delight in their achievements to produce a lasting result in raising their self-esteem and to greatly affect their quality of life.’
• ‘People seem to warm to a small group, with mutual ‘sharing and daring’ of creative skills, while developing a social network. They are then more interested in taking responsibility for the group themselves.’
• ‘In some ways I could have been a ‘client’ myself. When I retired, we moved 200 miles from where we had lived for 30 years. I felt isolated, insecure, cut off. My involvement as a mentor has helped me feel more settled, more secure, has encouraged me with a greater sense of belonging to where I am now, and given me the opportunity to use my skills and to feel of value.’
• ‘There was a lonely lady who joined us and just sat for two sessions. “I can’t draw, I can’t read, I can’t write, I don’t like painting, I can’t do that, I don’t like crayons.” Now she’s fine. Other people you can see just get more confident every week.’
• ‘He said the change in his aunt, who has been attending the print-making group, had been very noticeable. She herself had arranged to move to the residential home when she could no longer cope at home and she had expected to deteriorate at that point. However, since attending (the mentored activities), she had become chatty and alert and enthusiastically told people about what she was doing and showed them some of the work she was producing.’
• ‘It has been a real joy for me to see him come to life again… He seems to attribute a lot of the latest improvement to the mentor intervention… He has changed from someone who went out very little, found it extremely difficult to phone people and said that even the simplest of social interaction was very hard for him. Now he never seems to be in! … Driving lessons, voluntary work, computer course, all this in spite of depressing news about his lung condition. “I want to enjoy whatever time I’ve got left, not spend it feeling the way I have been over the last few years.”’