On Wednesday the 21st of September 2016, the team at Best Beginnings organised a community engagement event for the mothers at Tower Hamlets. Getting feedback and insight regarding the Baby Buddy App, maternal mental health, and the potential strategies that a community could take on to give children and parents the best parenting experience were the key focus areas of the day.

About 30 mothers and their children joined us in sharing their thoughts, feelings and valuable input. We started the day off with introducing Best Beginnings and the Baby Buddy App to the crowd. Then we went on to watch a few clips on maternal mental health and postpartum depression and discussed them as a group. We learned a lot about the community’s ideas and opinions about maternal mental health and the resources they are aware of having access to.

We then moved on to have group activity to get the energy up in the room where we got the babies and toddlers involved as well. Let’s just say that it involved sarees and it was just what we all needed to get comfortable and excited for the next hour!

The whole group split into two. One group went on to discuss the issues this group of mothers face with maternal mental health and their emotional well being. The other group got together to brainstorm about ideas that would help them as a community change the existing gaps in resources, information and knowledge

Parallel to all these discussions, we also got the mums to test our Baby Buddy App and giving us feedback as to what they think about its features and its usability. All in all, we gathered rich, raw information from the mums in Town Hamlets and we are so grateful for their feedback and participation in this event.

We wrapped up the day with a delicious lunch and the curries were a highlight for all of us at Best Beginnings!

If you're a parent and would like to find out how you can get involved with Best Beginnings please email [email protected]