Glasgow-based Founder and CEO, Cat Divers, created My Pickle CIC (from the phrase ‘in a pickle’) based on personal experience. Having faced and overcome personal challenges she understands how hard it can be to find support and wanted to help others.
Supported by hundreds of volunteers across the UK, the My Pickle website mypickle.org signposts to over 1,750 resources across a wide range of topics like health and money. Each resource is available nationwide and includes helplines and apps such as our Stay Alive app.
Here, Cat shares with us more about her story and how she created this initiative:
“A few years ago I hit a real low point in my life. I wasn’t happy at home or at work, was facing health problems, lost someone close to me and felt very alone. I spent weeks not talking to anyone, afraid to leave the house, unable to think straight. When I eventually realised this wasn’t sustainable and things had to change, I went online to look for help.
I can usually find anything online but for some reason finding help was really difficult. I wasn’t sure what to search for, got dragged down rabbit holes and ended up on some dubious and irrelevant sites. It took a lot of time, energy, phone calls and being referred onto other organisations to eventually find the help I needed. It was overwhelming and exhausting.
Sometime later one of my friends got in touch as she was facing a problem like what I had faced. I was able to share my story and point her in the right direction to find support, saving her the painful experience I had faced when looking for help.
I imagined a website that could pool similar experiences and knowledge of support resources to help others. Having had personal experience of struggling to find help I understood how valuable this could be. So I left my job to go and build it.
At our website, we make life easier, cut through the noise and help reduce barriers to support. We make it easy to discover helpful, national and trusted support resources without commercial bias.
This is needed now more than ever. COVID-19 has devastated many lives across the UK, and at a time when local support options are limited more people are going online to look for support. It’s essential that support options that are available remotely can be found quickly and easily.
Launching in October 2020, the website is still very new and we welcome all contributions from the public for stories and support resources to help others that may be struggling. No-one should struggle alone; there is support out there and we’ll do all we can to help you find it.
If looking for help for yourself or for someone else, or to add your story or missing support, visit www.mypickle.org
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Find National support resouces at www.mypickle.org
