Children and young people

Right Here Fermanagh

The Right Here partnership in Fermanagh was led by established youth charity YouthAction Northern Ireland . The partnership included senior representatives from the Youth Service, Education, Healthy Living Centres, Mental Health, and Public Health. The place Fermanagh in Northern Ireland has a population of approximately 55,000, with Enniskillen as its county town. It is a mainly rural county bordering on the Republic of Ireland with a majority Catholic population. The county has experienced over 30 years of conflict, particularly in border villages, leading to fragile communities and...

Right Here Brighton and Hove

Right Here Brighton and Hove was a partnership led by Sussex Central YMCA (now YMCA Downslink Group), along with Mind in Brighton and Hove and Brighton and Hove City Council’s Children and Families Services.

What do young people's services mean to young people?

Mark Brown from Social Spider reflects on the findings of a small research study into what young people felt about their involvement in the Right Here programme. What happens if you begin to capture what a mental health and wellbeing project means in the context of people’s lives? Right Here, the national five-year £6 million Paul Hamlyn Foundation/Mental Health Foundation initiative to develop new approaches to supporting the mental health and wellbeing of young people aged 16-25 did just that. The Institute for Voluntary Action Research (IVAR) carried out the process of evaluation of Right...

How can the development of youth work-led mental health and wellbeing projects be supported?

What Right Here learnt about creating, funding, managing, evaluating, and nurturing effective youth work-led mental health and wellbeing projects. Right Here was a young people’s mental health and wellbeing programme developed and managed by Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Mental Health Foundation that ran from 2009 to 2014. It funded four local partnerships – in Brighton and Hove, Fermanagh, the London Borough of Newham, and Sheffield – which worked with young people to co-produce and deliver a range of mental health and wellbeing activities, projects, research and opportunities. The...

How do we build partnerships to bring youth work & mental health together?

How honest and sustained relationships are the key to effective partnerships. Traditional wisdom for funders suggests that encouraging and supporting partnership bids from voluntary sector organisations can help to ensure that hoped-for outcomes are delivered. The assumption is that voluntary sector organisations in a town, city or region will be able to achieve more if they can work together and with statutory partners, particularly if the ambition is to change local practice and policy. In 2009, when Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Mental Health Foundation set in motion the five-year Right...

How can youth work raise awareness of mental wellbeing among young people?

How the message “everybody has mental health”, coupled with strong youth work-informed activities and approaches, helps young people understand their own and others’ mental health. Looking back over the second decade of the 21st century and the acceleration of mental health interest and activity in the UK, it is easy to forget that mental health and wellbeing have not always had such prominence. Beginning in 2009 and spanning five years, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Mental Health Foundation funded four local youth work-based partnerships (in Brighton and Hove, Fermanagh, Sheffield and the...

Why is focusing on relationships vital to improving young people’s mental health and wellbeing?

How young people’s relationships with trusted adults and peers can help them to flourish. In mental health, as in other areas of public and charity sectors, we tend to think in terms of 'services'. In the young people’s mental health and wellbeing sector, we often find ourselves speaking about Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) as if they were synonymous with the needs of young people. There is often a belief that only those with pronounced mental health difficulties will find their way to CAMHS, and that using CAMHS is evidence of having pronounced needs. Generally speaking...

How can co-production be made a reality in youth work-led mental health?

How real relationships, backed by supportive, resourceful management and funding, create the conditions for effective co-production. Within mental health, there are perennial rallying cries for people who experience mental health difficulties to have greater involvement in the creation of services that provide care, help and support. Termed ‘co-production’, this has been talked about more than actually carried out. Similarly, calls for greater availability of early interventions to prevent the escalation of mental health difficulties grow more strident every year, while complaints grow of...

How can youth work reduce stigma and isolation felt by young people with mental health difficulties?

How creating mental health and wellbeing-informed projects for young people with and without mental health difficulties normalises mental health.

How does mental health-informed youth work empower young people to make change happen?

How empowerment comes through the relationships that develop ‘through doing’.