About

Our story

Burntwood Spoonies Connect started in 2026 when Sha Taylor, a spoonie living with FND, ME/CFS and fibromyalgia, got fed up of feeling isolated in a town full of people, and had a hunch she couldn’t be the only one. She was right, and the community has grown steadily ever since.

What started as one person looking for company has become a proper community: people living with chronic illness and disability; conditions like ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, FND, EDS, Long Covid, MS, lupus and more; and the carers who walk alongside them, across Burntwood, Lichfield, Cannock, Tamworth, Rugeley, Brownhills, Walsall and the wider Staffordshire area.

What peer support looks like here

This isn’t a support group in the clinical sense. Nobody here is medically qualified, and we won’t pretend to be. What we do have is people who’ve actually lived it: the hospital waiting rooms, the DWP forms, the good days that get cancelled by bad ones. We talk honestly about all of it, including the bits that don’t have a silver lining. No toxic positivity, no “have you tried gluten-free”, no essential oils. Just people who understand, without needing it explained.

What’s on the website

Alongside the community itself, this site is home to two things worth knowing about:

• The Directory — a local, vetted list of charities, NHS services, support groups and spoonie-friendly businesses across the area, so finding help doesn’t cost you spoons you don’t have to spare.
• Spoonie Sessions — a growing archive of past livestreams, so if you missed one, you haven’t missed out.

Two groups, on purpose

We run two separate private Facebook groups; one for spoonies and one for carers. It’s a deliberate choice: carers have a different experience of chronic illness to the people they’re caring for, and they deserve a space that’s actually built for them, not a corner of someone else’s group. Both groups run on the same principles; kindness, honesty, zero tolerance for judgement. They just give each side of the story room to be heard on its own terms.

• Burntwood Spoonies Connect — peer support for people living with chronic illness and disability.
• Burntwood, Lichfield & Beyond Spoonies Carers Connect — peer support for the carers who support them.

Not on Facebook? There’s a WhatsApp community for both groups too — same people, different front door.