About Stoke Your Gratitude
Real appreciation for real life.
Based in Stoke-on-Trent.
Our Story & Evolution
Stoke Your Gratitude is a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (C.I.C.) that started with a very practical goal: teaching positive psychology, especially the science of gratitude, to help people build everyday mental resilience.
But doing community work in Stoke-on-Trent quickly taught us something important. Gratitude is not about pretending life is easy, ignoring hardship, or asking people to be thankful for injustice. Used that way, it becomes toxic positivity rather than genuine wellbeing.
Real gratitude can exist alongside grief, poverty, illness, discrimination, and uncertainty. It doesn't deny the storm; it helps people find moments of strength within it. At the same time, we recognise that resilience alone cannot solve systemic problems.
As a not-for-profit organisation, our mission has naturally grown beyond individual wellbeing. Today, we use community projects, creative arts, and practical resources to strengthen both people and communities, tackling challenges where we can while helping people develop the resilience to face those we cannot. Wherever possible, we'd rather build fences at the top of the cliff than simply wait with an ambulance at the bottom.
What We Actually Do
We keep our work low-pressure, accessible, and honest. Right now, that looks like:
Funded Community Projects
Songs for Health Equality (funded by VAST), The Gratitude Tree (funded by the National Lottery Community Fund), and Stoke Your Story (funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund).
Kitchen-Table Resources
Designing affordable printables, like planners, journals, and trackers, that you can print at home or use digitally.
Creative Expression
Blending traditional creative practice with artificial intelligence to create music, literature for wellbeing, artwork, and educational resources that make local social issues more accessible and inspire reflection, conversation, and community action.
Rooted in Stoke-on-Trent
Our work happens here because this is our home. Stoke-on-Trent is too often defined by outsiders talking about what we've lost, what's failing, or who has been left behind. But that narrative completely ignores the creativity, the deep heritage, and the stubborn community spirit that actually lives here.
We know appreciation doesn't fix inequality. A gratitude journal doesn't replace a good GP. But learning how to notice what matters is where the foundation for everything else has to start.