A new neighbour: workshops at The Blazing Donkey

Not far from Hay Farm, in the village of Ham near Sandwich, a nineteen-room former country hotel has started a second life as a residential workshop venue. It's called The Blazing Donkey, and Hay Farm's clinicians are involved in shaping some of its first programmes.

The two are neighbours, not one operation. The Blazing Donkey runs independently, with its own site and its own booking process. What connects it to Hay Farm is simple: some of the people who run groups here will also run work there.

What the building offers

Every delegate gets a private room with its own en-suite bathroom. Nobody shares. That caps a residential at nineteen people, and the venue is content with that limit rather than doubling up to fit more in.

It's the kind of detail that matters more than it sounds. A day spent in difficult material is easier to sit with when you know you have a door to close that night.

The kind of work it expects to host

Nothing is confirmed yet, so this isn't a programme announcement. The venue has set out the areas it expects to run residentials in: addiction recovery, family work, intervention for families trying to reach someone who isn't ready for help, relationships and intimacy, trauma, grief and loss, and work for people who feel stuck or a long way from who they meant to be. There's also space set aside for practitioner training and supervision.

A workshop there runs once enough people have registered interest in it, so dates are set only once a group is real rather than announced in advance and hoped for. If a subject on that list matters to you, registering interest costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

Finding out more

The Blazing Donkey's own site is at theblazingdonkey.com, including a page on what a workshop there is for anyone who hasn't done residential group work before. If you're a Hay Farm client and want to know how a workshop there might fit into your own treatment, that's a conversation for whoever you're already seeing here.