FOR nearly 20 years, Sheila Sanders has been a major player in ensuring people living in Herefordshire who suffer a brain injury are given a better chance to get their lives back together again.

She was involved in setting up the charity known as Herefordshire Headway in 1989 and has been manager for the last 14 years.

More than 1,000 people with brain injuries have been helped over the years and, at the moment, about 90 are receiving support and therapy.

Now Sheila has decided to move on but she is not saying farewell to Herefordshire Headway, just au revoir.

A qualified yoga teacher, she will continue her weekly yoga classes developed to help brain injured people and hopes to develop similar ones for special needs children and adults.

Sheila remembers the work of Headway starting off in a rented room in the old St Mary’s Hospital at Burghill with 20 injured people and five carers.

Six months later, it needed more space and rented a building on the Rotherwas Estate.

In 1999, Headway moved to the present HQ at Credenhill, a former RAF NAAFI which had been empty for four years and was in a grim state.

It was brought into order with the help of a lottery grant and generous benefactors.

Sheila has been known to wear her hair blue for a week, go a week without talking, abseil down St Peter’s Church and also spend a week in a wheel chair to raise cash.

She says her job as a manager is unrecognisable from the one 14 years ago and feels especially proud of the physiotherapy and speech therapy services she introduced into the portfolio of services.