MVA brings you Joy in Medway and Swale

MVA brings you Joy in Medway and Swale.

Joy Marketplace. A social prescribing directory of services for Medway and Swale, with potential to pay charities for what they already do!

MVA is proud to be working with Medway Council and Medway and Swale Health and Care Partnership to bring you Joy! Joy marketplace is a web based platform that connects social prescribing link workers with the Voluntary Community Social Enterprise & Faith sectors (VCSEF). Social prescribing is linking individuals with social activities that meet the needs that affect their health and well-being.

Joy - The right support is just a few clicks away (thejoyapp.com)

The funding aspect to this project is unique.

The best thing about Joy is it's FREE to join, plus there is also funding attached to the scheme. For the very first time funding is accompanying a referral. When an eligible organisation accepts a referral through the Joy platform from a Social Prescriber or Link Worker they will be paid a one off payment of £20.

Then there’s Seed funding as well.

There is also a £40K seed funding pot available welcoming applications. This is for organisations that can demonstrate they are fulfilling gaps in provision and need a one off pot of funding of up to £5k to get things off the ground. Please contact Mark Wicker at MVA to find out more. Markw@mva.org.uk

The Joy Marketplace is an intuitive system that helps to improve efficiency and connect people together. Some of its key points are:

• Provides the opportunity to promote your charity/CIC to receive referrals.
• Uses categories and keywords to filter to relevant services.
• Provides referral pathways and signposting options.
• Service providers can customise their referral form.
• Service access criteria is a key component helping to reduce inappropriate referrals.
• Improves efficiency of link workers, helping to reduce the time it takes to make a referral.
• Robust security with encrypted messaging to protect individuals' data.
• Communication message function between link worker and service provider.

Joy is up and running and growing. MVA are actively seeking organisations to sign up.

Mark Wicker, the Project Manager working for MVA, has been busy engaging with social prescribers to facilitate their training and access of the system. He has been promoting the platform to the voluntary sector to onboard their activities onto Joy.

We have seen the platform steadily growing while encouraging social prescribers to begin to put their training into action and actively start to refer their clients to activities.

We are seeing more and more organisations realising the benefits of Joy and are listing their activities. However we are not there yet, with (at the time of writing) 498 activities on Joy we have made a good start, but we need more and so MVA is actively encouraging organisations to start the onboarding process and realise the benefits from being part of Joy.

If you’ve read enough and want to begin the signing up process to Joy please use this link Request to add your service to Joy.

Mark is very keen to meet with anyone interested in knowing more about the benefits of being part of Joy. Please contact Mark at markw@mva.org.uk or call him on 07983 405956.