Liz Rothschilds unique & original show combines mercurial tales and miraculous truths collected over the years from life’s finishing line.
About this event
About the show:
Outside The Box asks its audience to embrace mortality and look on the bright side of life, with a weave of untold and surprising stories, a hint of history and some pithy commentary on the funeral industry (from one who knows!).
Liz shares her unique experiences as a celebrant, burial ground owner and death cafe facilitator, these encounters are swept together in a show which has been brewing inside her for years. The result is a taboo-busting affair that expertly handles the ‘elephant in the room’ with humour and grace.
As Liz travels the country to perform, the show evolves organically to include new stories shared by its audience, widening the experience. The post-show element of Outside the Box has been fabulously popular and successful, validating the cathartic power of the show and its resonance with audiences.
If you – or someone you know – has been personally affected by palliative care, we want to hear from you.
Palliative care is treatment, care and support for someone with a complex or incurable condition, and those at the end of their life. It focuses on the quality of someone’s life, managing physical symptoms, offering emotional and practical support to the patient, their family and friends. Palliative care can take place in the home, hospital, care home or a hospice.
We’re working with Havens Hospices, St. Luke’s Hospice Basildon and District, Saint Francis Hospice and Farleigh Hospice, so your experiences will help shape the future of palliative care services for local people of all ages in mid and south Essex.
Whether cared for by a hospital, hospice or community service, we would like to know what you most wanted and needed during this time, and if there were any barriers to accessing these.
The survey will take five minutes and will be completely anonymous, unless you have more to say and would like to leave your details. You can also contact us on 0300 500 1895 if you need to access the survey in a different way.
The Movement for Good Awards is an annual platform for giving, set up by all the businesses that make up the Benefact Group. It’s our opportunity to make a tangible difference to the lives of the people and communities we serve, by supporting the charities, not-for-profit organisations, and community interest projects that mean something to you.
This year we are donating more than £1 million, and we can’t do it without you!
Nominate a charity today
You can make a difference. We’re not asking for money, or any real time, just your nomination of a registered charity, not-for-profit organisation, or community interest company in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands or Isle of Man. Anyone can nominate and that one act could potentially mean an extra £1,000 to those trying to make a difference. The more nominations a charity receives, the greater their chance of winning, so once you’ve done your part, spread the word and make it a movement!
Through the Aviva Community Fund, we’re committed to supporting the organisations that are doing great work to build stronger, more resilient communities across the UK. We’ve provided thousands of causes with funding, skills and resources, and we’ve seen up close just how much of a difference this has on the lives of the people involved.
By delivering quarterly funding and year-round support, we hope to get behind projects that are making a sustainable impact on their community.
How does it work?
The way the Aviva Community Fund works is to back small charities with forward-thinking ideas and to provide even more causes with vital resources and sustainable support.
Did you know that businesses in Essex can access free workplace health and wellbeing support?
Working Well, part of the Essex Wellbeing Service, is commissioned by Essex County Council and provides organisations of any size and sector in Essex (excluding Southend and Thurrock) with a range of wellbeing support. Whether you’re looking for some mental health training, HR support to develop your management skills, or want to build a comprehensive programme of activities, Working Well is here to help!
There are four different offers available:
Working Well Accreditation – earn up to three different levels of accreditation by evidencing your commitment to employee health and wellbeing. The process is flexible and designed to help you meet the needs of your employees.
Mental Health Aware programme – for organisations looking to increase and embed mental health awareness within their workplace
Small Business HR Support – open to micro-enterprises, small and medium organisations without dedicated HR support
Individual MHFA training – one free place on the MHFA half day Mental Health Aware course
As part of these offers organisations can access a range of other training and e-learning, workshops, guest speaker sessions, plus a newly launched Apprenticeship Growth Programme.
To find out more please visit the Essex Working Well website or you can email essex.workingwell@nhs.net and one of the team will be in touch to discuss your organisation’s needs.
Have you explored the endless insights that Essex Open Data has to offer?
The Open Data site holds a wealth of information on multiple subjects, from population statistics to economy and community safety, giving you valuable on-demand insight to plan, prioritise and shape the services you deliver.
Want to know who is most at risk of fuel poverty in Essex? You want access to the latest Essex Climate Action research? Would detailed inequalities information help to inform your service planning? Essex Open Data has everything you need!
Essex Open Data is also sharing more statutory information with the recently published Looked After Children dashboard, an easy to use interactive tool enabling you to explore information that relates to children looked after by Local Authorities, including placements, legal status, adoption from care.
Watch out for the 2022 Joint Strategic Needs Assessment coming soon to the Open Data platform. It will provide insight on the current and future health and care needs of local populations helping us to inform and guide the planning of health, wellbeing and social care services within Essex.
Essex Open Data advocates for the use of open data as an opportunity to increase transparency and engage residents in the information that is produced and used by local government. We believe that communities, businesses and public sector organisations can benefit from the shared knowledge created by open data, helping us to make better decisions, as well as stimulating innovation across Essex.
ELS hosting a workshop at the Police Fire and Crime Commissioner Conference taking place 24 May, where we’ll be sharing our recent work with Essex County Fire and Rescue Services, demonstrating the impact it’s had on service delivery, and we’ll be working with partners to identify new opportunities to collaborate on open data projects. You’re welcome to join us, get in touch via open.data@essex.gov.uk
The Community Challenge Fund is the simplest way to access money to make a real difference in your community.
You can bid for between £300 and £2,000 to fund a new, not for profit scheme, group, initiative or idea. This fund is available in Clacton, Harwich, Canvey, Harlow, Rural Braintree and parts of Colchester and Basildon.
You can only apply if you are :-
Applying as an individual
Applying as a group (The applicant and other individuals they are working with)
An un-constituted group (small scale voluntary groups who do not have any employees and who do not pay trustees or staff)
Perhaps you have been sitting on an idea for a while of how you can enhance your community and it has just lacked the necessary funding to get it started. If so, then this fund is for you. You may want to set up a food growing initiative in your local community to create a garden and social space, or perhaps you want to create an informal childcare club of likeminded parents in your local library.
This new fund is simple to apply for, so don’t worry if you have never applied for funding from a Council before.
The Community Challenge Fund forms part of Essex County Council’s commitment to reducing inequalities between different areas of our County, and Levelling Up Essex.
Examples of how the grant could be used include:
• training and equipment to share skills and create training opportunities,
• printing for a local event or newsletter,
• hosting and promoting an online magazine for young people,
• setting up a local community seed exchange,
• providing taxi or licensed hire vehicles to bring isolated residents together,
• setting up a clothes swap in a community hall.
For further information on the Community Challenge Fund and to make an application, please click the link below:
Healthwatch Essex is an independent charity which gathers and represents views about health and social care services in Essex. Our aim is to influence decision makers so that services are fit for purpose, effective and accessible, ultimately improving service user experience. We also provide an information service to help people access, understand, and navigate the health and social care system.
The recent Covid-19 pandemic meant that some addiction support services were impacted causing them to temporarily shut down which heavily affected interaction with people in need of support. Subsequently, many people found their recovery journey more difficult with some relapsing during this period. This resulted in many falling into addiction which created a clear correlation with poor mental health either as a cause or effect of this. Healthwatch Essex captured the lived experience of those who are living with an addiction, who are in recovery and the ‘affected others’allowing them to share the support available and some of the barriers to seeking this support.
Please note that this report relates to findings and observations carried out on specific dates and times, representing the views of those who contributed anonymously during the engagement visits. This report summarises themes from the responses collected and puts forward recommendations based on the experiences shared with Healthwatch Essex during this time.
Stuart Pearson, head of business delivery at Citizens Advice Oldham, Rochdale, Trafford and Stockport, attended a sector event in London earlier this year. During a networking break, he got chatting with a group of peers over a coffee.
As the conversation moved from professional to personal, Pearson found himself growing increasingly uncomfortable.
After the event, he tweeted about it. “Does the charity sector have a class problem?” he asked. “As someone who grew up on a council estate, single parent family, free school meals, I rarely meet senior charity people with similar stories. I always find the small talk really alien.”
The tweet hit a nerve, garnering 148 replies, 159 retweets and more than 2,000 likes. “I was really taken aback by the response,” Pearson says. “Lots of people said they were also from a similar background and felt the same way.”
The responses to Pearson’s tweet, as well as similar experiences shared by others in the sector, suggest that perhaps the question is not whether the sector has a problem with class but how big the problem is.
Unfortunately, at the moment, there isn’t a clear answer to that question.
“We don’t have any good data around things like social background in individual organisations, or in parts of the sector, or in the sector as a whole, or on how it presents as a problem,” says Sarah Atkinson, chief executive of the Social Mobility Foundation. The charity runs the Social Mobility Index, a benchmarking tool that asks organisations a series of questions to gauge how they are performing on social mobility and where they can improve.
This set of downloadable ‘evidence cards’ highlights the contributions of and shocking inequalities experienced by Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic groups approaching retirement age.
Older generations are becoming more diverse than ever. But also more unequal. There’s an increasing level of inequalities in terms of health, wealth and life circumstances.
The inequalities described in this set of ‘evidence cards’ are particularly significant as older generations also become more ethnically diverse: the number of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people aged 50-70 is growing at a faster rate than the number of White people.
It’s vital that these inequalities are tackled so that no one misses out on a good later life. This means better paid work, more affordable and better housing, and targeted measures to reduce ill-health.
We recognise that grouping together Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic groups can miss the nuances of their experiences. However, this should not lead us to conclude that there are no shared experiences. We also reinforce our previous calls for ethnicity data reporting to be made mandatory in all official and statutory statistics and data monitoring.