Joining in with God – Ginn Downes, Herefordshire Headway

Joining in with God: In this occasional series for our blog, we hear from people from around the diocese who are inspired to work for good causes.

Ginn Downes worships at St Mary the Virgin, Burghill. Ginn teaches art at Herefordshire Headway, a local charity based in Credenhill, affiliated with the national Headway organisation. Headway is dedicated to supporting adults with an acquired brain injury (ABI) and their families and carers. They help individuals rediscover independence, re-learn skills, and find community through specialist rehabilitation and peer support.

“I think you tend to step up a bit more, give more of yourself, when you’re working for a charity,” says Ginn. “You go over and above, and put in more hours, more effort. It’s not a Christian charity, particularly. There are people there who are Christians, yes, but God doesn’t get mentioned in the work unless it happens to be somebody’s ‘thing’. But, clearly God’s there in the building. What I do at Headway, teaching art, is a healing ministry in a way.

“It’s not therapy, because we’re not trained art therapists, but it is therapeutic art. Our aim is to help people to discover their own individual style and, in doing so, discover – or re-discover – the person they are. We can teach technique and we can teach how to look, how to see, what the best approaches are to the task, but ultimately it’s the person you want to come out through the work.

“Our family connection with Herefordshire Headway goes back a long way, to 1992, when my father-in-law had a brain haemorrhage. He went to Headway for rehabilitation support. So my mother-in-law started volunteering there, and a good friend worked there. The then CEO, who is an active Christian, and who lived in the village, asked me to lead an art group, about nine years ago. It had been on our family radar for such a long time, and I had seen the devastation of brain injury on one hand and all the good Headway does on the other, so I thought, yes, okay, this is where I’m supposed to be. That personal connection made me think: I want to give something to it through my work with art.

“Headway does a lot of things to help people recover from their injury and regain independence, but creative, hands-on therapeutic activities are where you see people really engage. Often it’s something they’ve never done before. If you have a brain injury, trying to do the things you’ve always done can be very frustrating. Doing something completely new and different that you’ve never really done before is quite freeing because you don’t have expectations. I help people to find a way to ‘make their mark’ on the world, despite their injury.

“We had an exhibition down at the HARC earlier this year and that was fantastic. As soon as somebody has their work mounted and framed and it goes up on the wall, they’re amazed at what they have done. You lose part of your identity when you’ve had a brain injury and your identity is so important. Your art can be become a witness to your identity in that you put the marks down in a certain way, the way you wanted, the way you are now. People think: “We all did the same study, but that’s mine. That has me in it.” Even if their identity is different now, it still has value. I think that’s what putting something in a frame does, doesn’t it? People come and look and buy a specific piece that speaks to them, and that’s fantastic.

“It’s easier to feel like God is at work, and that we are joining in with that work, when things go well. But people at Headway are sometimes in a really bad place. Quite often I find myself thinking, “Oh, please God, let’s get this situation right for this person,” but it doesn’t always go right. I still believe God is at work through the challenging times. You see such extraordinary situations, people dealing with such devastation, and you think, “Oh, goodness me, I must not moan about anything!” So it is very humbling to be there.

“I see a lot of love at Headway, there’s so many volunteers. I think we are a very good nation for volunteering. It’s part of our DNA, isn’t it? It feels like everybody’s there because they’ve been drawn there, they’ve been called, it’s a vocation. You feel that you really are helping people, so you get such satisfaction from that.

“Who is being healed? I think everybody who’s doing this kind of work is definitely being healed!”

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RESOURCES

Herefordshire Headway