Exploring the hidden curriculum

BY HANNAH BARR Another year and another cohort of young people have completed ‘Find your fire’, Doorsteps’ ten-month programme for helping young people at risk of disengaging identify what they are good at, what they feel passionately about, to attach value to those things, and help them look at ways of developing in them. Sarah […]

Digging deeper into prayer

In their busy lives, Christian youth workers are often more responsive rather than reflective, and don’t always have the opportunities to stop, share, plan and pray. One of the aims of Doorsteps, Viva’s partner network based in Oxford, is to provide this space. We are identifying a greater collaboration between youth projects, and currently have […]

“I’ve waited years to hear about mental health in this way”

BY HANNAH BARR Around 90 people who attended Doorsteps’ mental health conference last month have returned to their communities informed and supported about the subject and empowered to make a difference. The event at St Andrew’s Church, north Oxford, entitled ‘A Christian Response to Child and Adolescent Mental Health’, drew participants from across Oxfordshire, and […]

Making mental health more visible

BY HANNAH BARR This is Mental Health Awareness Week (14-20 May), with the NSPCC revealing that schools in England made almost 125,000 referrals for specialist help since 2014, with more than half of these coming from primary schools. Across the age spectrum, the stats on mental health struggles look bleak. Last week, British universities said they […]

Lent 2018: ‘For The Kingdom, The Power, And The Glory Are Yours’

BY HANNAH BARR We might think that the gap between the sacred and the secular in a Western context has increasingly become a chasm. And yet, you don’t have to search too far to discover that the ways the sacred – something of who God is – permeates the world around us. The writer Leonard […]

‘Sorry, I Went Sad Again, Didn’t I?’

On ‘Blue Monday’, Hannah Barr writes about why good mental health is feeling the full range of emotions – even sad ones – and how Viva’s programme in Oxford is giving young people the space to reflect on their feelings and get support if they need it. We can learn a lot from a girl called Riley… […]

Please Like This Blog. My Self-Worth Depends On It.

BY HANNAH BARR What was your first experience of the internet? I don’t know if this was my first experience, but I remember being about nine or ten and having to do a school project on a European city and searching the web for everything it could tell me about Amsterdam. I proudly presented my […]