One in Four magazine
One in Four
is Social Spider’s flagship project.
It’s the only national magazine for people with mental health difficulties, written by people with mental health difficulties.
It’s a quarterly full colour magazine that takes information, inspiration, real life stories and hope to people who need them.
It’s about making sure that people with mental health difficulties can have the lives that they want to have.
With One in Four we’re making mental health difficulty a normal part of life.
The magazine is sold in bulk subscriptions so that organisations can distribute it to anyone who might benefit from it.
Social Spider developed the project, developed the distribution (over eleven thousand copies per quarter as of our eighth issue published in march 2010) and solved for ourselves all of the problems that have prevented anyone doing a similar magazine before.
It’s been developed outside of the NHS and any mental health charities, although many support us in what we’re doing.
The challenge of establishing and sustaining this groundbreaking and necessary project is something we relish, as it is a perfect example of the kind of social change we can make happen.
Contrast Magazine
Funded by Hackney Council's Youth Opportunity Fund, we developed Contrast with young people from the borough. A bi-monthly glossy A5 magazine written and led by young people, Contrast creates a space for young people to share their ideas and concerns while also providing a place for Hackney Council to publicise all that is great for young people in the borough. We involve young people in all parts of the production process and are led by their ideas.
Instead of working from a fixed base, we go out to where young people are and work with them there. The regular editorial team meets weekly in a community space. We facilitate, support and guide the young people and make sure that everyone involved is happy with each issue.
We also make sure that the young people involved achieve documented outcomes and support them in taking their interest in journalism and magazine production further. In everything we do with Contrast we are helping young people to challenge stereotypes and show themselves and their ideas in a positive light.
We developed a distribution method that gets 5000 copies of each issue into the hands of young people across the borough.
‘A Better World’
Over thirteen weeks we worked with a group of people who experience severe mental health difficulties to produce a book 'A Better World'. The book is made up of short creative pieces.
We worked closely with the authors to help them to develop their creative skills while focusing on saying things about their lives that people might not expect. We love doing projects like this in partnership with organisations. Download 'A Better World' pdf.
Citizen Journalism
Citizen Journalism is about training people to use the skills of journalism to make a difference in the world. When people take our courses they go away with the skills, ideas and knowledge to begin to get their messages out there and make change happen.
Citizen journalism training can be useful for people who:
- Want to represent themselves effectively
- Want to start or develop a newsletter or publication
- Are interested in blogging
- Who want to extend the reach of their service and its users into social media
- Want to make the world sit up and listen
We love training people to understand how news is made and then begin to make it themselves. Download info on our courses.
Walthamstow Now
Another project of our own, Walthamstow Now is a free local magazine distributed to shops and businesses in our local area. It celebrates positive stories and builds a greater sense of our local community as a living, breathing thing. Using the Future Jobs Fund we’ve taken on young people and given them an opportunity to work on an exciting and challenging project.
Self Help Housing
Working in partnership with Agents For Change and hact, Social Spider is currently running a campaign to get community groups to take over and renovate empty houses for people to live in. This is a practice known as self help housing.
The centrepiece of this campaign is the website selfhelphousing.org, which is the first place to ever provide a step by step guide to setting up a community organisation, asking property owners for properties and a guide to everything you need to manage a project and turn empty houses into full homes.
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