MATES

28/07/2025

Since January 2019, MATES Mental Health Support Group have held our weekly Mental Health and Wellbeing Walk & Talks which provide a place where people can come and get things off of their chest and share their problems or concerns, or simply just get out of the house and meet new people.

No photos, no notes, no stigma, just a nice walk and chat in the safety of people that care and will not judge.

Did you know a good walk can have a positive effect on your mind and body for up to 7 hours!

MATES have had a long running association with CALM, the UK leading su***de prevention charity, and as of 2023, MATES weekly walk is proud to be one of CALMs official Walking Clubs. Working together to help our community.

The Walk & Talks are generally attended by men, however women are of course welcome. People often bring their children and dogs and they generally last for about an hour around the beautiful Hylands Park.

Though based in Chelmsford where we have held well over 300 Walk and Talks alone, we have also held walks in Colchester, Glasgow, Ipswich, Nuneaton, Wales, Crete, Athens, Amsterdam, Santorini and Barcelona to name a few.

Want to join us on our next walk? Check out the events tab on the public MATES page to register your place or email weareyourmates@gmail.com

Conversations Change Lives. Help us get the conversation started 💚

18/06/2025

Mental health Awareness Through Educational Speaking 💎

Everyone needs good mates in their corner... MATES is there to be your friend. The one who means it when they ask you "How are you doing today?". The one who takes time to listen to what's on your mind. That friend who is always open and honest when they share their experiences and understanding of mental ill health.

MATES Mental Health Group was created to be a safe community where people can speak openly about mental health.

We are a community, a peer-support network. When you talk, there are MATES who have the same experiences, listening and sharing what you are going through, offering you the benefit of their experiences.

It's about honest, friendly and real conversations.

We revolve around a safe members-only Facebook group which acts as an online chat room for people to speak openly, confide in one another, and most importantly, help one another.

Through sharing our experiences, we aim to help everyone realise that...

It's OK to not be OK

For every new member of our community, there is someone who has been through similar experiences and come out the other side.

You are not alone

Conversations Change Lives. Help us get the conversation started 💚

16/06/2025

There are many different Mental Health issues that can affect someone's day to day life, but many of them can be effectively managed with the right combination of therapy, medication and support systems.

Here are some of the most common types of mental health issues people may experience in their lives.

12/06/2025

What is Mental Health?

10/06/2025

Last month, during Mental Health Awareness Month, we began reintroducing what MATES and MATES FC is on our Instagram accounts, with the plan to begin looking back at events from the past 7 years and relaunching some of our MATES clubs and events including the MATES Running Club, MATES Golf, MATES Cycling, new MATES Walk and Talks, a NEW MATES PubHub, new Mental Health and Wellbeing drop-ins and in general, lots of new activities and opportunities to help you interact with one another.

However, with all the recent changes and updates that have been going on behind the scenes; with new groups of volunteers and MATES ambassadors getting more involved with the day to day running of MATES, we realised none of the new group were set up to help post this content to our most important online platform of all, Facebook!

So, over the next few weeks, we will be catching you up on what's been missed from Instagram, before getting back into the swing of things and syncing up both platforms and revitalising our Facebook groups, getting the conversations started again 💚

Then, from July, on both MATES and MATES FC, we will be focussing on specific mental health issues where we would love to hear from you and have your valuable involvement in the content and stories we share, and each week, there will be a new 'What's on at MATES' post every Monday letting you know what's coming up!

Thank you all for your continued support and being a part of our community. We are ready to grow and LET'S GET THIS CONVERSATION STARTED!

03/06/2025

A new month, a new good cause, and this month, that is

Instead of charging a monetary fee to attend our MATES events, we instead ask for a donation to one of the good causes we support each month, and throughout June, that good cause is Wallace Kennels - a small family run dog rescue dedicated to helping stray and unwanted dogs in and around the Essex area.

Donations can be things such as clean towels, blankets and linens or washing liquids/pods.

At the end of the month, we then round up all of your donations and drop them off at Wallace as one big donation from our community.

So if you're coming along to our MATES FC Thursday night 'play as you go' football training this week, or any week throughout June, one of our MATES ambassadors will be on hand to collect donations.

Head over to our website to learn more about our MATES in the Community initiative.

Using our community to help the wider community 💚

09/02/2025

Thank you to those that came to today’s misty weekly walk & talk. Lovely to see two new faces this week. Every week 9am, Hylands Park. MATES is a CALM Club.

22/01/2025

Good Morning all,
For anyone that doesn't no me, my name is Dave and I set up MATES back in 2018 due to losing close friends to su***de and watching other close friends battling daily with Mental Health issues. I wanted to do anything I could to help people who are struggling.

We started with a group of 5 of us volunteers based in Essex, and grew to around 30 Ambassadors in a number of Countries and Counties carrying out walks, drop ins etc.

When Covid hit we moved mainly online and as with any groups with volunteers, volunteers move on and we adjust what we do accordingly.

We have been very lucky with our MATES FC Football group, with hundreds of people attending our games and fitness sessions since we started in 2019 and a great team of volunteers, constantly growing. We have over 60 attendees a week to these events alone.

Our MATES In The Community initiative has seen our attendees and ambassadors working together to collect and donate huge amounts of goods and food to local good causes such as Rough Sleepers, Women's Shelter, Dog Rescue, local children and families that are struggling and the Food Bank. We have made a difference to so many peoples lives in the community and also to those in the MATES community.
We have seen so many great friendships grow and have a great community of attendees that have become like family, mainly through the MATES FC side and the Weekly Walks.

Also I lost my Brother, my Mum had a Cardiac arrest where I managed to get her heart started again, then in less than two years I lost my beloved Mum and Dad who were my absolute everything, my world.

However hard this has been, it is f course lifechanging, and has taken its toll on me, but the experience has given me even more passion to help people, and share what i have learnt to get up through grief everyday and keep going, and as bad as this chapter of my life has been, my parents have blessed me by arming me with new skills, new outlooks and new fight when I had none left in me, and I want to use that to help anyone else that has suffered loss. Speaking openly and honestly about my own experiences will hopefully help others and that is what this group is about.

This year we want to get the rest of our MATES world up to this level, and we have a great group of volunteers to help us grow and be there for you when you need us. We will be having a new and refreshed Running Club, Cycle Club, Golf, Walking Club, New Football capacity, a new MATES PubHub, Quiz Nights and new Drop ins, among other events.
As well as that we have a new set of online campaigns in the public and private groups and pages where we look into all different types of Mental Health issues and hear from yourselves and your experiences which is where the best help and advice has always come from.

We would also love to hear ideas from yourselves about what else would be useful from us to assist you?

We will have weekly `What's on at MATES this week?` posts in here that will link all events from across the MATES pages into one place so everyone knows what is going on and where they can come and have a chat.

There will be new MATES FC and MATES podcasts as well as new links to our back catalogue of podcasts on MATES TV and MATES FC TV.

Our key two aims are to get the conversation started in the Private Chat group going daily, so people can talk and get things off their chest and know there is a community here that genuinely cares. Where the community uses their own experiences to help each other. And to get more people to come and chat in person at our in person drop ins and events.

We have had many options over the years to expand our services and what we do however it is massively important to have solid foundations to be able do that to ensure we can give the level of support required, and up until now we have not had enough volunteers to do that. I'm confident we have a great team now ready to take us forward.

We are always looking for new volunteers to do one of the many different tasks and activities we cover, if you are interested in volunteering for us, or have any queries, please email us at weareyourmates@gmail.com

Thank you for your patience

We are YOUR MATES

Conversations Change Lives.......Lets get this conversation started!

Dave

10/10/2024

Since setting up MATES FC we have always proudly worked hand in hand with the UK’leading Su***de prevention charity Campaign Against Living Miserably. Before we kicked our first ball we were part of CALM’s football collective. A couple of years later we were chosen as one of a handful of football clubs nationally that do more for their community and support peoples mental health to become one of CALM and Carling’s initiative of becoming one of their ‘CARING United’ clubs, and we are also one of CALMs leading Football clubs.

At MATES we are also proud to run the following CALM clubs with our own activities:

Weekly MATES-CALM mental health and well-being walk and talks
MATES-CALM Running Club
MATES - CALM Walking Club
MATES- CALM Cycling Club
MATES-CALM Football Training Club
MATES -CALM ‘let’s talk mental health’ drop in

This World Mental Heakth Day, CALM have produced this video.

CALM’s vision is that no one feels like su***de is their only option. But right now, too many people are struggling to see a way forward.Every day in the UK ...

08/07/2024

10/04/2024

A huge thank you to Dave and his team from MATES for their generosity yesterday. Dave delivered so much food to us that we needed both trolleys! This has stocked our shelves up greatly! We can’t carry on without the kindness of others 🙏🏻

12/02/2024

As half term approaches
❤️💙