Do you try to work out how you are impacting emotional wellbeing with your beneficiaries when you don’t have a background in mental health? Do you wonder how to support your staff in their own wellbeing in a collaborative and co-produced way?
You might be a youth worker, teacher or work for the police force. You might be a sports coach or local council worker.
Here at the Mental Health Foundation, we work alongside a variety of different organisations. We are a ‘critical friend’, as we listen to organisations to support their learning around wellbeing and highlight the impact they have on staff or a community.
A Welsh Youth Service contacted us and wanted to know what was different about the mental health support they gave to young people compared to education, health and social care. They also wanted to discover how to be better at evaluating the impact their work was having on the mental health of the young people they worked with.
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Over a 12-month period, we helped them find their mental health ‘unique selling points’ and find better ways to capture the difference they were clearly making. This in turn helped them define themselves and created new opportunities for funding.
We draw alongside you as a Learning Partner, not assuming we know it all, but exploring with you the work your organisation already does in relation to preventing poor mental health and promoting good mental health.
Some of the questions we ask organisations to think about are as follows:
- ‘How does or can our work impact mental health in the community?’
- ‘How do we measure what impact we are having on mental health?’
- ‘Do we understand what our employees’ needs are regarding their own wellbeing?
The results we gather help our partners to think about the positive changes they can make, as well as celebrating the success of work, they are already doing.