Celebrating Success with Chalte Chalte Walking Group

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Get Walking Keep Walking has been working in partnership with Trafford South Asian Mental Health Team to encourage the South Asian community of Manchester and bordering Trafford to join the Chalte Chalte walking group to meet like minded people and discover their local area.

Chalte Chalte is literally translated as walking walking, and is also the name of a famous Hindi film. This helped inspire a number of women to come and join the walking group. We were also joined by staff and people who use the BlueSCI Social and Cultural Inclusion service.

We went on 4 led walks that took us to Salford Quays, Seymour, Hullard and Longford Parks and the former GMB College which is soon to be the largest Muslim heritage centre in the country.

After the 4 week programme of led walks, the group decided that they wanted to continue and enjoy the benefits from regular walking. Every Wednesday since October the Chalte Chalte group have continued to go out walking with the help of Elaine, a Get Walking volunteer. At the end of February, Trafford’s STRIDE walking scheme will train some of the ladies to become volunteer walk leaders so that they can run the walking group themselves.

One of the ladies from the walking group enthusiastically told me, “This group is great, I have met new people and enjoyed getting out of the house. I have even started to notice that I don’t need my inhaler so much”.

Jen worked closely with Alya Rafiq and Yasmine Dar from the South Asian Mental Health Team to make sure that the group was widely promoted within the local community and that the ladies were supported and encouraged to take part.

Alya told us, “I’ve really enjoyed working with Get Walking, they provided all the publicity material and designed and led all the routes. Every week we had fresh fruit and bottles of water and Jen and the volunteers made every session fun and informative”.

Posted: Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 7:16 pm, filed under Featured News, Manchester Blog, Manchester Success Stories, News, Partner Case Studies, Success Stories.
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2 comments

  1. This was a great group, really nice enthusiastic walkers. On week 12 they all contributed delicious home made food for the celebrations and then went walking in the snow!

    Comment by Mags (volunteer) on 5 February 2010 at 3:54 pm

  2. The group illustrated above loved coming to the walks, we have successfully continued the walks for the 12 weeks as instructed by Jen. We have never had so much fun this had not just been any old walk, we made a diverse group into a social inclusion group. making friends with volunteers and sharing their thoughts and views with each other it was nice to see every one bond and engage with each other.

    Alya Rafiq

    Comment by Alya Rafiq, mental health support worker on 9 February 2010 at 2:49 pm

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