Building a movement for prevention in mental health

Location: United Kingdom

10 Jun 2026

Mark Rowland

Chief Executive

Over the last year, we have been talking with our supporters, partners, board, staff and those with lived experience to shape our new 2026 to 2031 strategy; A call to act: fighting for prevention in mental health.

Below is our journey towards a more focused and ambitious plan for change - and an open invitation to join us in making it happen.

We are at a pivotal moment. Report after report has found that mental health problems have risen steeply across the UK over the last decade, with the most significant increase for children and young people. Meanwhile, the national response remains terribly stretched and overly focused on crisis rather than prevention.

Our new strategy, “A call to act: fighting for prevention in mental health” (2026–2031), sets out a bold vision to change this.

We knew we had to change as an organisaiton if we were going to rise to this challenge. As a public health charity that is over 75 years old, it is vital we evolve and adapt, engage new audiences and meet the demands of a changing world.

To do that, we had to look squarely at our challenges, explore how to address them and identify where we could contribute the most for our charitable purpose, with limited resources.

So, what is the new strategy looking to do?

We are doubling down on our founding belief: mental health problems are not inevitable. With the right policies, environments and support, we can reduce the impact of things which pose a risk to good mental health, while strengthening those that protect it, and doing so we can empower people to live mentally-healthy lives.

Our long-term ‘north star’ aspiration is to see real and sustained improvements in mental health and wellbeing from 2025 levels that benefit everyone fairly across the UK.

But that is a vision that needed breaking down.

A good strategy must lead to clear choices to achieve impact. We knew from feedback from staff and partners that we were stretched too thin. We needed to focus our work to a smaller number of key issues and activities. As one of the few UK wide mental health charities, we looked at a range of operating models and concluded we could have the greatest impact through what we called a movement builder model.

This meant backing into our core capabilities in research, public information, policy and lived experience to drive change. We chose to invest more in campaigning and lived experience than we’d done before.

But it also meant the difficult decision to bring an end to our brilliant work developing and running a community programmes across the UK. These programs were doing important work, often with vulnerable groups. We have worked to ensure that across all our programmes, we left the strongest legacy possible. We’re delighted that in many cases, work like Becoming a Man (BAM) or Together to Thrive will continue with partners better placed to develop and scale them.

With so many factors impacting our mental health, we also needed to choose the issues and subjects where preventative action could make the biggest difference. Especially for children and young people – whose mental health has deteriorated most.

We took our time to decide; commissioning research, engaging partners, staff and trustees and those with lived experience. We asked our supporters to vote on those issues they thought were most important. We developed a set of criteria to decide where we could make the biggest difference. That criteria included:

Where the evidence showed profound links to mental health and prevention potential
the Foundation’s experience and credibility, and ability to drive meaningful change
Issues the public were concerned about and where deep inequalities persist
Issues with political engagement and traction
How themes connected so that making change in one area could influence others.

In other words, we were principled but pragmatic. It meant that important issues like loneliness and the early years – absolutely critical to the public mental health agenda – didn’t make our priority list either because others were already leading or we didn’t see a clear opportunity for us to drive change.

So, alongside championing prevention as a key pillar of UK mental health policy, we are dedicating our work on three key areas; to influence online worlds, the experience of bullying and discrimination in schools, and improving working life for young people as they enter the workplace.

These are crucial forces shaping lives today. They are issues where almost all of us will have had some experience of their mental health impacts. We know how crippling working stress can be; we have lived with the hidden scars of bullying; we have learnt the hard way how harmful and addictive technology can be.

Our job is to harness the evidence, lived experience and public support to identify better solutions and persuade decision makers to take the big actions that will make a difference, especially for those facing the biggest disadvantage.

We established staff working groups across the Foundation to develop these themes and strategic goals to animate and shape our work. Each working group developed not just goals but priority areas of work and measures to track impact.

These goals are as follows:

Championing prevention – building a UK‑wide movement for prevention and making it an accountable, funded and evidence‑led pillar of UK mental health strategies.
Creating healthy online worlds – Influencing the digital environment to ensure people, especially young people, are more mentally healthy in their online activity and better protected from online harms.

Tackling bullying and discrimination – Reducing the mental health harms from bullying and discrimination among children and young people in schools, and preventing bullying behaviours.
Improving working lives – ensuring young people can thrive in mentally-healthy workplaces, particularly SMEs.

Finally, we looked at the key resources we needed to succeed. As a people powered organisation, we want a culture where our staff can thrive and we can build the organisational resilience that is so vital in an uncertain world. Prioritising fundraising, harnessing technology and deepening our commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion – especially anti-racist practice – are the three pillars on which our strategy rests.

But there was a final piece to the puzzle. The Foundation is not a service provider. We exist to drive and lasting change. To do that, we know we must work with others, collaborate and join forces with partners.

That is where you come in. Preventing and reducing mental health problems is one of the greatest challenges of our generation and we need passionate and skilled academics, partners, donors, people with lived experience, businesses and foundations to join us in this mission.

I’m grateful to the superb Cathy Irving who steered this work and to the trustees, staff and partners who gave their time and insight to develop this strategy. But this is just the end of the beginning. Please join us in fighting for prevention in mental health!