Spiritual care trolleys built by Benchmark
GMMH has 18 Multi Faith and Belief spaces across services for service users to access and practice their spiritual beliefs. In order to complement the designated spaces, Jeremey Jaw from the Chaplaincy and spiritual care team made a successful bid to the Trust’s Charity account and ordered 18 Spiritual Care Trolleys to be part of the provision for each Multi Faith and Belief Space.
Each unit is made of solid oak and individually crafted and undertaken through the Trust’s Benchmark team. Benchmark is part of Recovery Pathways, a Trust’s Manchester citywide service. The aim of the Recovery Pathways service is to build confidence and skills, enable personal recovery from mental distress and support access to moving on, through creative and wellbeing themed practice that is delivered in supportive settings. This commission has been a real boost for Benchmark and its service users following the move to new premises over a year ago, where they operate a fully functioning furniture making workshop. Benchmark produces a range of professionally made items from bird tables to bespoke furniture and take on a variety of projects on request.
This collaboration between Benchmark and Chaplaincy has been a very positive and fruitful enterprise. Jeremy Law and David Lowery have worked together to coordinate and see this project through alongside the Benchmark service users and the Chaplains across GMMH. At Benchmark, David Lowery has overseen the creation of 18 Spiritual Care Trolley’s working with a cohort of Manchester GMMH Service Users to manufacture each trolley. Each trolley is comprised of seven draws – one drawer for each of the six major belief organisations; Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Sikh and an additional seventh draw for Humanism.
The Spiritual Care Trolley recognises the importance of Spirituality as a concept that respects and promotes faith-based beliefs but equally acknowledges the importance of non-theistic beliefs such as Buddhism and Humanism as an atheistic worldview. Whilst there are clearly many beliefs and faith perspectives (atheist, non-theistic, agnostic and theistic) that are not included within the Spiritual Care trolley design – the trolley signifies our commitment to spirituality as an inclusive concept that welcomes a multitude of recognised faith and belief perspectives. This principle extends beyond the seven specified faith and belief organisations and accompanying draws. The attached pictures details a trolley in the production process – once designed each drawer has an attached symbol designating the faith/belief group it is representing. The intention being that each drawer will be filled with appropriate books and artefacts from the faith/belief organisation that are accessible to the enquiring service user.
“It’s been a huge achievement for the Benchmark team to finish this commission of 18 trolleys for the Trust especially during such difficult times. The dedication of service users and staff has been fantastic and we look forward to receiving many more interesting and varied projects to work on in the future. Well done to service users and David Lowery for making this happen!”
Charlotte Brown, Recovery Pathways Lead
