Kiah's Journey at Healthy Minds

 Kiah Hamilton-Adams has been involved with Healthy Minds since 2017, when she first began volunteering with us. She has been instrumental to the success of many different projects and has brought enthusiasm and drive to our team. We'll be saying goodbye to Kiah this week as she embarks on a new chapter. But first, we asked her to reflect on her journey with us and what volunteering at Healthy Minds has meant in her life. 

I started at Healthy Minds as a volunteer in 2017. I had just started a gap year because I decided at the last minute that I didn’t want to do the university course I’d originally applied for and I had spent a lot of time advocating for better mental health provisions for young people and wanted to continue this work in some form.

​After completing my volunteer training with Cath, I started facilitating an Anxiety and Depression support group with Tracy (who now manages the Link project). I facilitated the group for a short time before moving to the Time Out team where I supported the delivery of school workshops. During my gap year, I got stuck in, co-producing workshops, sharing my personal story in many schools and eventually leading my own workshops.

I gained a lot of skills while volunteering for Time Out, I grew my confidence, and belief in myself while learning about the importance of my life experiences. I also learnt more about my own mental health and ways of looking after it through talking with Healthy Minds staff and seeing how they support others.

After a year I left for university but carried on volunteering. I wrote about my experiences volunteering with Healthy Minds which led to my university giving me a scholarship and the British Council awarding me with a place on a funded trip to China.

Then the pandemic happened. I kept volunteering, joining Zoom calls for online coproduction where I got my inspiration for my dissertation research. The research looked at the differing impacts that volunteering online vs in-person has on the volunteer, and it came from my own experiences of suddenly needing to volunteer online due to the pandemic.

By April 2021 I had finished my degree work and started looking for jobs and by May 2021 I ended up back at Healthy Minds but this time as a Project Manager! However, even without the job at Healthy Minds, my volunteer experience meant I was able to apply for a multitude of positions at other charities where my application would have never been considered if not for my volunteer experience.

Now over two years later I’m leaving Healthy Minds, and I have accepted a job in the West Yorkshire ICB Suicide Prevention team. Reflecting on my time here I’ve been involved in Healthy Minds one way or another since I was eighteen. Volunteering and working here has been an amazing experience and it’s given me the opportunity to grow as a person. I’ve learnt so much from all the people I’ve come across at Healthy Minds and I am really sad to say goodbye to all the amazing people who make Healthy Minds what it is.


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