‘Digging Deep’: The Ipamo Project, 1995-2002
Outreach
In the lead up to the completion of 107 Tulse Hill, Ipamo focused on strengthening local community support networks. The organisation held consultation days for service users and carers to provide feedback on the proposed service areas. They also began the community education and development programme. In the summer of 1998, Ipamo started support group programmes for Black parents, counselling courses for local church leaders and elders, and ‘rights of passage’ workshops for young girls to explore their ideas and aspirations. These activities all point to the importance of mental health treatment outside of formal mental health contexts.
This investment in preventative and peer-led care was part of the foundational work former Ipamo chair Hari Sewell foregrounds as necessary in his 1997 Chair’s report. Sewell states that ‘at Ipamo we dig deep’, discussing the need for a concrete base of support from the community if Ipamo was to be successful and more importantly, vital.
This concrete base of community support is also reflected in the organisation’s ‘Pyramid principles for delivery service’, which repurposed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to create a service model which centred community as the foundational pillar of healthcare services. The pyramid principle acknowledged how fundamental the relationships between service users, staff, carers family and neighborhoods were in providing good care.
Ipamo also provided training courses which provided guidance in supporting people diagnosed with mental illnesses, including how to make the best use of local resources. Alongside community trainings, Ipamo also facilitated training events for Lambeth Healthcare Trust on cultural issues and culturally sensitive assessments.