Post by The Listening Place

Ten years ago this week, The Listening Place started delivering its first appointments 🎂 Back then, we were a tiny operation: just 20 volunteers, working two days a week from the offices of Wandsworth & Westminster Mind on Vauxhall Bridge Road. What began as a trickle of referrals soon gathered momentum, and over the next 18 months, TLP received over 1,000 referrals and began opening seven days a week from its first stand-alone site at 3 Meade Mews in Pimlico. By October 2018, that site had reached full capacity. Two further satellite sites, one at a CNWL NHS Foundation Trust building in Victoria and the other at King's College Hospital, tided us over until another stand-alone site could be found. We opened our King's Cross centre in December 2020, doubling capacity and allowing us to support 3,500 people a year. A couple of years after that, we secured our building in Hammersmith, and by August 2024 we had received 30,000 referrals. Our fourth site, on Cobb Street in East London, opened last October and we now have enough capacity to support 10,000 people every year. We are so grateful to everyone who has played a part in making all this happen: our amazing volunteers, our generous donors and funders, all the partners in the NHS and beyond who refer dozens of people to our service every day. And we are grateful to the visitors who put their faith in us in the early days, before TLP was tried and tested, who came along to their appointments and then told us how much it had meant to them to have that warm, welcoming, confidential space to explore their suicidal thoughts. You let us know that the model worked, that there was a real and urgent need for a free, face-to-face service. You motivated us to keep fundraising, growing, training more and more volunteers, ensuring that there were always appointments for those who needed them, and never a waiting list. Thank you, and here's to the next ten years 🧡