The past few months have been incredibly challenging for everybody in many different ways; the pandemic has had a huge impact on every element of our lives.
As a family business supporting mental health through 1:1 interventions, our initial concerns were how we were going to reach the many children and adults who rely on our interventions. Through quick thinking and incredible adaptability from our fantastic team, we were able to transfer all of our sessions on to online platforms.
Through our online sessions we have been able to provide support to all of the children that we work with; in the early stages even working with local authorities and social workers to ensure the most vulnerable children had a means to access us. As lockdown rules started to ease, our teams started visiting children in a socially distanced manner – even going to their homes and always going the extra mile.
The pandemic has created a ripple effect touching every area of our lives. It has caused us all to have to adapt quickly and manage change in the face of adversity. For us as a family business, this felt very scary indeed and we felt extremely vulnerable when thinking about how this could impact the future of our business that we have put our heart and souls into building and then our absolute everything into ensuring we can survive this challenging time whilst continuing the much needed service we provide – perhaps even more so now than ever before as all of our mental health and emotional wellbeing has been impacted.
When we first went into lockdown we were inundated with calls wanting to postpone our service until schools opened again. We explained to all of our school partners that if we went down this road, then there may well have been no more Canine Assisted Wellbeing Group come September or when schools opened again. We simply would not have been able to survive and would likely have been another business casualty of COVID-19 with all of our teams left without a job.
Fortunately for us, our clients listened to our proposals and listened to our plans for our online offering. They stood by us and supported us and we are so incredibly grateful to the schools and workplaces who have believed in our adaptability and given us a chance. Schools, parents, teachers and workplaces have seen the huge value and importance of the service we provide with almost all establishments increasing their hours to offer even more valuable support to those who need it the most.
On behalf of all of our incredible, resilient team, we would like to thank each and every person who has supported us – from the bottom of our hearts. Thank you for helping us to survive.
As a gesture of our appreciation, we are offering a FREE Mental Health First Aid Awareness Course to all schools and workplaces who we are currently working with to say thank you. Please get in touch with your usual contact to arrange a booking or contact us at info@canineassistedlearning.com
Stay safe 💛