Help us share a small gift of kindness during Carers’ Week 7th – 13th June 2021
Carers’ Week is an annual campaign, raising awareness of caring, highlighting the challenges unpaid carers face, and recognising the contribution they make to families and communities throughout the UK. It also helps people who don’t think of themselves as having caring responsibilities to identify as carers and access much-needed support. The campaign is brought to life by thousands of individuals and organisations who come together to support carers, run activities, highlight the vital role carers play in our communities and draw attention to just how important caring is.
At ISMAUK we would like to offer our support and help during Carers’ Week. Please take the time to read this special newsletter and see how you and your colleagues, friends and family can help.
Watch these ISMAUK Energiser videos for free and help improve workplace wellbeing
Clare Concannon (right) is ISMAUK‘s Lead Ambassador with 30 years’ experience of corporate training, lecturing and mentoring projects. She is now a creative business mentor who uses the backdrop of the great outdoors to stimulate creative thinking. As a part-time carer, Clare focuses on supporting those experiencing challenging life and career transitions. This is what she says about Carers’ Week and ISMAUK – “It’s the small things that make a difference to me as a carer, balancing work, life and care responsibilities – often all at once! Being kind to yourself as a carer is a relentless struggle, especially after the pandemic with risks to our own physical and mental wellbeing. Carers need opportunities to refresh, restore, and re-balance. In this spirit, ISMAUK are kindly making five Energiser videos, which featured in their Global Stress & Wellbeing Summit last year, available to carers for Carers’ Week. For me and others like me, this is a positive step, helping us be kind to ourselves.”
We’ve made it easy to watch these short, uplifting Energiser videos all through Carers’ Week – no booking required, just click on each of the links in the attached listing. Please share these great resources with friends and colleagues too!
Plus – watch world-leading experts on wellbeing and sustainability
ISMAUK are also offering carers, businesses and others in the community the chance to watch one of their brilliant Masterclasses – a unique discussion between Professor Sir Cary Cooper, world-leading expert on workplace wellbeing and Professor Lennart Levi, Founder and Director of the Division of Stress Research at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. Talking about wellbeing and sustainability in the changing world of work, they ask leaders of this and the next generation to embrace the challenges ahead, and it’s truly inspiring. To view this motivational video, click here and please share it with leaders, educators, influencers, entrepreneurs, charities, young people and communities. Let’s start to make a difference, using Carers’ Week as a catalyst for change.
Make your own pledge during Carers’ Week
The Carers’ Week team are asking as many people as possible to help them make caring visible and valued by finding an activity for Carers’ Week. It could be anything from delivering a wellbeing workshop or taking a health walk, to a session on valuing yourself. To upload an activity on the website takes a moment – so far over 600 activities have been uploaded! Why not ask family and friends to get involved too? To pledge your own individual or organisational activity, simply go to https://www.carersweek.org/ – it’ll appear on the map of Carers’ Week activities across the UK.
Join ISMAUK as a Friend and support Carers’ Week
ISMAUK is a small charity with a big voice and a wide reach. During Carers’ Week, we can only reach further with your support. By inviting people to use and share our video resources and encouraging them to join the ISMAUK community as a Friend will not only make our work more sustainable, but also more accessible to those who really need it right now. To become a Friend of ISMAUK it’s easy and costs you nothing – sign up here
Simon Hawtrey-Woore is a carer, a coach, and an ISMAUK member and this is what he says –
“I am so grateful for the recognition and resources being made available through ISMAUK for those of us who live in Carers’ World – a parallel world that exists in a different time zone. It’s a world where you are glued to an individual and their every need yet feel desperately lonely. You are needed, relied upon, show up unconditionally, but get little recognition. It’s a world you can’t step out of and feel trapped in. You are often in fear of not coping – asking for help means admitting you can’t cope. If you know a carer, please signpost them to ISMAUK. If you are a carer, I hope you will find the courage to approach ISMAUK and ask for help. They will offer a helping hand in the Carers’ World.”
Win a Carers’ Policy for your business!
Charlotte Turnbull, Solicitor and Head of Employment at W Legal, and an ISMAUK Ambassador, is offering the chance to win a Carers’ Policy for your business when you sign up to be a Friend of ISMAUK. (If you are already an ISMAUK member or signed up as a Friend of ISMAUK, you will be automatically be added to the draw).
A Carers’ Policy is usually charged at £250 + VAT, so this is an offer well worth taking up or passing on.
Charlotte says – “Businesses can support their employees with caring responsibilities by incorporating a Carers’ Policy into their staff handbook. Carers UK estimate there are over 6 million unpaid carers in the UK. Many combine paid work with unpaid caring responsibilities. It is challenging for employees to balance competing responsibilities, causing many to reduce their working hours or stop working altogether, resulting in a significant loss of skills for employers. Where carers leave because of their responsibilities, employers have to pay recruitment and training costs for new recruits and there is a risk employees will join a competitor if they re-enter the workforce at a later stage.”
Please help ISMAUK to support carers during Carers’ Week and all year round
The UK’s 6.5 million unpaid carers have taken on huge challenges as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. 1 in 8 employees now have caring responsibilities and 4.5 million became unpaid carers during the Covid-19 pandemic in a matter of weeks! Many have had to provide more care while dealing with financial pressures and increased levels of isolation. As carers continue to face difficult circumstances this year, it’s vitally important that we raise the profile of unpaid care so that carers are recognised, respected, and given information and support.
Thank you for sharing this newsletter and the Carers’ Week calendar with friends, colleagues, local businesses, other organisations, and your local charity network.
With kindest regards
Carole
