Changes to Leeds Autism AIM’s online groups

Earlier this month, the Yorkshire Autism AIM service, which runs parallel to Leeds Autism AIM, announced that they were running new twice-monthly mental health peer support groups. One session will be in-person at the Lovell Park Hub and the other will be on Zoom. To help accommodate them, there will be a change to one of Leeds Autism AIM’s regular groups. Starting in June, we will only be running one online peer support session instead of two. This will be on the first Tuesday of the month at the regular time of 6pm-7pm. The peer support group we would normally run on the third Tuesday of the month will no longer take place. This is part of our roadmap towards running more of our services and groups face-to-face. However, the Yorkshire Autism AIM team will run an online mental health peer support group. This is on the third Tuesday of each month on Zoom from 6pm-7pm. It will be led by Georgia and Harry from the Yorkshire Autism AIM team.

Existing group peer support members

Please note that if you have signed up to join Leeds Autism AIM’s peer support groups mailing list, you won’t automatically get updates on joining the Yorkshire Autism AIM ones. If you are interested in attending the mental health peer support groups, please register at this link: http://eepurl.com/h1HQC1. To list all of our and Yorkshire Autism AIM’s groups, we will publish a joint groups timetable, starting in June.

Returning to face-to-face

Yorkshire Autism AIM’s in-person mental health peer support group will be on the first Tuesday of the month from 6pm-7pm. This will be at the Lovell Autism Hub. Hosting the group there will be a trial run for us to start returning to running more services face-to-face. For the time being, we are running two Hub sessions a week for booked appointments only. These are on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4pm-7pm. There, we can offer:

• Advocacy
• Information and signposting
• One-to-one peer support, including through the Health Access Project
• Post-diagnostic support for newly-diagnosed autistic adults

To book an appointment for any of the above services or attend the in-person mental health peer support group, please make a referral if you haven’t accessed any Leeds Autism AIM services before or haven’t made a referral using an online form. If you have referred to us before, please contact us. Later this month, we will publish a roadmap of how we plan to return to more face-to-face activity. If you have any questions about the groups, hubs or returning to face-to-face, please email us at [email protected].