What a day it was yesterday! For those of you who travelled from all across England and Wales to join us at our first face-to-face conference since 2019, I should like to say a huge THANK YOU.
I hope you all enjoyed it as much as we did. It was so good to see everyone in the same room. Judging by the conversations, you sounded as though you enjoyed catching up with people you had only seen on Zoom over the past 3 years. I heard words like action, energy, inspiring, thought-provoking and collaboration, and these definitely matched my own take-home thoughts.
We want to ensure that those of you who were unable to attend will be able to share in the success of the day and see some of the activity, outputs and next steps. We shall be writing up a comprehensive summary of the conference over the next few weeks after we have had time to reflect more and, more importantly, hear your thoughts. Kelly will be sending out evaluation forms later this week.
Thanks also to our panel members, Errol McKellar MBE, Janet Daykin and new Trustee Simon Faulkner, who supported our desire to #tacklerepresentation by so openly sharing their experiences as people from currently underrepresented groups in our prostate cancer community.
We made some large announcements yesterday that I will cover below. Also, below you you find the results of the AGM held on March 15th. We have 4 new Trustees- and warmly welcome Tony Collier, Simon Faulkner, and Peter Corbishley, and we are delighted also to announce the return of Ken Mastris.
I am off on holiday for a few weeks from tomorrow, but please get in touch with your thoughts, and I look forward to catching up with you when I return on April 11th.
Tackle Prostate Cancer- Prostate Cancer UK Partnership
Yesterday we announced at our conference an exciting new partnership between Tackle Prostate Cancer and Prostate Cancer UK
Currently, local prostate cancer support groups currently have two supporting charities at a national level: Tackle Prostate Cancer and Prostate Cancer UK . We know this creates confusion and overlap for support group leaders and duplication of effort across the two organisations.
What is changing?
Under this new partnership, Tackle will become the sole organisation providing direct support to these groups and offering membership to their leaders.
Prostate Cancer UK will step back from relationships with local support groups, but they are proud to endorse Tackle’s offer to support groups.
As a patient-led, UK-wide federation, both organisations believe that Tackle are ideally placed to become the sole organisation in this space.
This partnership will bring valuable funding to allow us to support groups currently not members of our federation. We shall also be able to work with groups in other areas of the UK , especially Scotland, where we currently have no support groups.
Nothing will change about our current offer to our members, and we look forward to be sharing more of this exciting new partnership over the coming months.
#TacklingRepresentation
We are committed to engaging with groups that are under-represented in our service user group and understand more about their needs in order to identify barriers to their access and inclusion in our services. As the first part of this work we want to ask you and your members to give us your views in two surveys.
One survey will be for you as a Group Leader, and the other we ask you to distribute to your members by forwarding them the link to the survey for them to complete.
These surveys are being conducted by researchers from the University of Greenwich via our partner Metro Charity and results will be anonymised and will be confidential.
The results of the surveys will allow us to be able to help Support Groups ensure we are reaching all parts of your communities. Links to the surveys will be sent out later in the week. We will be incentivising people with the offer of a prize draw on completion.
It is essential that we get enough responses for the results to be statistically viable; therefore, we are asking you to support this.
We will also be offering a choice of 3 workshops on equality, diversity and inclusion. These workshops will be delivered by Metro Charity.
March Support Group Leaders Meeting
This month we heard from Malcolm and Sacha from ASDIC. There are drop-in centres across the country, we would urge you to find your local service, and link with them about awreness, both of risk checking and to raise awareness of you support group. Do let me know how you get on.
You can find the slide set here
If you do not currently attend our Support Group Leaders meeting, then please consider coming to the next one. The meeting is open to anyone currently in an organising role of one of our support groups.
At our next meeting, we shall be hearing from some of our new Trustees, including plenty of time for questions. As well as updates on campaigns and news in our regular Hot Topics section.
The next meeting will be held on
Tuesday April 4th from 7.00pm – 8.30pm
Meeting ID: 862 9460 8255
Passcode: 444302
Hot Topics
One of the outputs from the Support Group Leaders meetings that you told us that you find helpful is our regular Hot Topics section. This slide set can be directly shared with your group members. This month’s Hot Topics can be found by clicking here
