What started as a conversation in the living room of a house only 18-months ago with three good friends, has grown to become a fulltime organisation working in the last year with over ten thousand people.
It is truly amazing what we have achieved since then, but now that we have found our place and know our services are required - there is many changes needed to meet the demands of the community.
ALPs was founded solely to provide education and training around Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, a task we could not have done without our partner organisation in Wexford, "Talk To Tom," but we have always been asked to do so much more.
Quietly and largely under the radar for sometime we have been working with others to provide counselling to the community in Belfast and Downpatrick, indeed in the last year we have been very fortunate to bring on board three counsellors to provide over 300 hours of this service because of our concert events and private donations.
In addition to this we have projects aligned to the Department of Justice and through the Education Authority we have provided Children's Wellbeing training in over fifty schools, furthermore we are working with youth clubs, soccer, Gaelic and other sporting organisations throughout our communities.
As ALPs grows so do our services as we attempt to meet the needs of the community. We have reached a crossroads that for sometime has challenged us immensely.
Although determined, we have found the need for our services was beginning to outweigh our capacity to deliver. But we have found a solution and now it is time we developed a new approach. A community development approach that will cater for all.
With this in mind, we have reached out and are extremely proud and excited to announce that we are joining forces with, “The Health and Wellbeing company” to create a full holistic approach readily available to all.
This collaboration will allow both organisations to create something very unique all for the benefit of the community. Together, both organisations have been working in the background to create something truly special.
The all new service operated from Downpatrick will officially become live on Monday 18th Feburary and be open to all who need us or want to help us.
We have engaged with so many people, allowing us to expand our portfolio programmes to work with people of all ages and have developed new and exciting partnerships throughout the whole community.
In addition to this we have created a designated therapy clinic and office facility in “Down Buisnesss Centre” that will offer a vast array of therapies including; Counselling, CBT, Mentoring, Reflexology, Aromatherapy to name just a few.
But we don't stop here, it is our aim that this new collaboration will become a one stop organisation that can offer everything in terms of promoting positive wellbeing.
We want you all to join us and be part of our future, already we have a community team of over 30 people onboard to assist us with our work and we want this to grow. Without the support and engagement of the community we can not do anything. There are roles for everyone to get involved, so please come and help us. To find out more about volunteering - click here .
It is an exciting time, although daunting everyone behind ALPs, “The Health and Wellbeing company” and the community that we have developed behind us, is humbled to be in this position to help others. Recently their has been many sleepless nights, blood, sweat and tears to get ALPS to this point, but every second has been worth it.
We look forward with great anticipation, to start over and bring our expanded services to all.
Team ALPS