Dear All,
I hope this finds you well. I'm writing to say a huge thank you for your support in our first month of operation as The Empathy Project.
On 1st April we opened our doors for a first time, after many months of hard work behind the scenes to create the foundations for what we hope will be a service that will help hundreds of people in the years to come.
Our small team of counsellors came together with a vision of creating a truly independent, truly non-profit community mental health service. We have one goal; to provide high-quality, open-ended counselling and psychotherapy to anyone who needs it, and to do so as well as we can, for as long as we can.
How are we doing?
We've been absolutely thrilled with the reception from our community, with a huge increase in our website traffic and new enquiries from people seeking support, meaning that we've created a brand people can trust enough to ask for help.
In April we delivered a total of 105 full counselling sessions, of which 17 were through our Community Fund, providing help at a reduced cost for people in financial difficulty.
Without this, in many cases, those people would not have been able to access the mental health support that was right for them. We're extremely proud of that achievement, and we hope to help many more people this way in the coming months.
What are we doing next?
We have bold and exciting plans for the future, to expand and improve our service. This will begin by recruiting new counsellors and psychotherapists to our team, thereby diversifying our range of expertise but also increasing our capacity to see more people on days and times that work for them.
We've also been developing our own mobile app, that will allow our clients to book and manage their sessions more easily, as well as message their therapist outside of sessions in a secure and confidential way.
We'll be adding other features such as mental health resources, guided videos for dealing with anxiety attacks, journaling intrusive thoughts and accessing crisis support in an emergency. This app will be free of charge and available for anyone to use.
Best wishes,
Tom Bulpit MBACP
Managing Director & Psychotherapist
Counselling Southampton