The Purple Elephant Project in Twickenham has been running since 2019 and we are delighted to announce a donation of £2,200 through our Children’s Community Support project to them to help run their art therapy sessions for children and their families during the next half term.
We conducted an interview with one for their founders, Jenny Haylock about the organisation and what the donation from Little Lives UK will mean for them. We also wanted to find out a little more about what their goals are and who they will be helping in their community.
Who started the Purple Elephant Project and when did it start
“The Purple Elephant Project was started by myself and play therapist, Coleen in November 2019. We all know what happened in 2020 so we hit a bit of a wall as soon as we started!”
Why was The Purple Elephant Project started?
“Whilst we were both working with children, we could see there was a gap in the services that children needed to get the help they so desperately need. We were becoming frustrated at the lack of funding that these vital services need and how difficult it was for children and families to access the support so we decided to start the Purple Elephant Project to address this problem.”
Who the Purple Elephant Project supports.
“We have an ethos of supporting the adults around children as well as solely supporting the children. We support children who come to us with all manner of concerns; from mental health worries because of a volatile home relationship to someone who is processing trauma.”
“We use creative art therapy, play therapy and use a holistic approach to help adults and children work together in solving and coping with the concerns they approach us with.”
What is the main reason children seek support from you?
“This is hugely varied, there are so many reasons. Children have been supported by us for reasons that range from low self-esteem, being neglected, having anxiety, school refusals, they have lost a loved one, having anger issues or they may just not be happy at the time they come to us. There are a huge number of reasons people want to work with us.”
How many children do you support?
“Currently we support 107 children a week through our community outreach programmes and at our centre. It sounds a lot but we would like to up that number to supporting 120 children a week.”
What will the donation from Little Lives UK mean for you and the children you support?
“With the donation from Little Lives UK we are able to pilot more art therapy sessions that will hopefully see a lot more children and families supported. We can then do what we do best by providing unique therapy which integrates art and talking therapy into our sessions. We will be able to run the sessions more efficiently, buy more equipment and hire the use of a professional art therapist for the sessions. We hope this donation will help us to fill the gap in the service provision for this kind of activity that we know helps out so many people.”
What is the next step for the Purple Elephant Project?
“Because when we started the Purple Elephant Project, we pretty much went straight into the first COVID lockdown so it was hard to become established within our community so we are now looking to become closer with our local community and to find out what they really want from a service like ours. We want to work closely together with the people near us to do the best job we can.”
If you want to find out more about the Purple Elephant Project and our donation to them, please visit their website or their social media accounts.
We at Little Lives UK are extremely proud to be working with such a great organisation using everything they can to do so much good work in their local community for families and children.
