Imagining the future with Cork Mental Health Services
In Spring 2025, I was invited to collaborate with Cork Mental Health Services, a network of amazing people whose work spans 49 North Street in Skibbereen, the Feel Good Festival, arts and health programming, and so much more. The team is made up of service users, HSE and clinical staff, UCC researchers, community organisers, and artists.
The first step in this unfolding process was to design and deliver a one-day workshop, to collectively explore and shape the vision, mission, values and principles that would guide their many community-led initiatives. These initiatives are already offering vital spaces for belonging and support—this was a crucial moment to pause, reflect, and articulate a shared direction, co-designed by the people who live and breathe the work.
Following the workshop, I gathered our collective insights into a summary and working draft—a living document to circulate among wider stakeholders for reflection, iteration and ownership.
A Creative, Collaborative Process
The day was set in the beautiful CECAS setting and followed a gently structured rhythm, inspired by an adaptation of the Double Diamond design thinking process—a pattern of diverging and converging, opening and refining. It’s a shape that invites us to resist the rush to answers, to trust emergence, and to return often to the deeper why.
We began with a simple invitation: “What is your state?” A grounding mindfulness check-in which can be found in the Collective Imagination Practices Toolkit - offering 5 questions designed to create space for self-awareness and collective care—qualities that are not separate from the work, but central to it.
From there, we moved through a sequence of activities designed to hold complexity, honour many perspectives, and make meaning together:
Image-based visioning
Reflecting on where we are now, and where we might go—through images, intuition, and imagination.Empathy mapping
Naming the needs, hopes and challenges of the people we serve—putting lived experience at the heart.Crafting the vision
Asking: If this work is successful, what will people know, feel and do? From this, a vision of the future began to take shape.Mapping our values
A collective “word storm,” surfaced shared language for the principles that guide the work—before refining into 4–6 core values.Mission building
Drawing from all we’d gathered, we shaped a mission statement—a compass for everyday action aligned to long-term purpose.
Reflections from the Room
Today was clarifying informative and very useful. Your facilitation was very focused helped me to clarify my thinking and other alternatives, you extended parameters and teased out more implicit ideas to explicit. Thank you.
Honest and constructive discussion, challenging of ideas towards refining vision and mission, having time out to think all very helpful. Facilitation style of structure, as well as room for blue sky thinking was very good for me. There was space for many voices, opinions and an authentic start, reflecting where we want to get to.
Thank you Becky for a lovely day. I loved how you started with mindfulness and the chimes. I felt this really reflected you as a person and your approach. There was a lovely calm and creative flow to the day. I found the different exercises very interesting and hopefully I might be able to use them myself in the future. I’m happy to have learnt something new today.
Very enlightening to see the structure of building on the ideas of the group, great presentation and clear instructions, made me think about things I wouldn’t normally think of.
Very interactive good selection of useful exercises, excellent mix of participants, the language used was very practical.
Great to feel part of a group striving to achieve something meaningful, offered a route or at least signposted on how to get there, clear and engaging, I felt acknowledged and valued. My opinions and thoughts were respected and listen to.
A Living Exercise
This workshop wasn’t about branding, perfection, or polishing a message to fit into neat boxes.
It was about recognition—of the rich, layered, ongoing work already happening, and the power of taking a moment to reflect, align, and reimagine together. It was about noticing the risk of doing too much without direction—and choosing instead to move with intention, collectively.
This was a beginning. A shared sense of direction. One that honours the power of community-led care, centres lived experience, and embraces creativity as a way of knowing and healing.
And it was a celebration of what’s already unfolding:
From 49 North Street to Bantry Café, from Clonakilty Resource Centre to the West Cork Feel Good Festival—this community is already shaping a different future for mental health in West Cork. One that feels rooted, relational, and real.
