How UK Youth are shaking up funding to improve mental health support for young people
Researcher
According to a 2021 study by NHS digital, it’s estimated that 1 in 6 young people have a diagnosable mental illness - a statistic that has grown from 1 in 10 in recent years. The Centre for Mental Health argues that young people’s mental health is “underfunded”, which is contributing to “sporadic and limited provision”. As a result, there are significant concerns over the decline in young people’s mental health and wellbeing in the UK - and a need for a swift response to address its wider determinants and how these can be effectively tackled.
Dartington Service Design Lab has teamed up with UK Youth, a leading youth charity working across the UK with a vision that ‘all young people are equipped to thrive and are empowered to contribute at every stage of their lives’. Together we’re using learning and insight to guide the strategic development of the Thriving Minds Fund over a three-and-a-half-year period.
The Thriving Minds Fund, is providing the opportunity to engage with 99 charities and not-for-profit organisations across the UK, including full-time youth worker posts, able to support thousands of young people.
Ndidi Okezie, Chief Executive of UK Youth said: “We established Thriving Minds in response to the growing number of young people struggling with their mental health post-pandemic, knowing that youth workers are ideally placed to help. The need is now greater than ever. Young people are already feeling the effect; stress levels are rising at home and often the only person they feel safe sharing their concerns with is their youth worker.”
Bringing in a learning culture to improve practice
To set the foundations of this work, a series of evidence reviews were conducted to better understand the need and scope of the project. We analysed:
Effective approaches to improving engagement among young people experiencing mental health problems
The ways the sector is looking to enhance their mental health literacy, and
Best practices to embed sustainable youth work expertise within organisations, charities and local authority youth services.
Among these best practices were knowledge-sharing and the implementation of online mental health support to increase reach and accessibility amongst young people.
This was validated by a series of online surveys released to grantees to assess their baseline learning needs and skills, which highlighted how building connections and knowledge-sharing were sought after.
In response, over the next three years, the Thriving Minds fund will be used alongside the development of a ‘Grants Plus’ model, a unique and broad offer of support, providing organisations with additional learning and scoping opportunities to integrate shared learning with grantees across the sector. Specifically, this offer will provide youth workers with tools to respond confidently to the mental health needs of children and young people, through creating a learning-focused agenda which opens a culture that embraces different types of practice.
Creating an approach that supports trust, learning and connection
The Thriving Minds fund will help those in the youth mental health sector work in an ambitious way, alleviating the current pressures and improving the support system for youth workers to deliver effective youth work interventions. The approach includes:
Unrestricted grant processes: This element of support provides opportunities for organisations to rethink long-standing practices while cementing relationships with grantees by attending and shifting funding to their needs. This not only supports trust between the funder and grantees but also aims to build stability for organisations facing uncertain times. Our hope is together, this will improve long-term outcomes and encourage staff retention, recruitment and innovation (Steele, 2021).
The formulation of wraparound support to grantees: Together, we hope to create a strength-based culture by coordinating learning opportunities designed around grantees’ needs. These will incorporate reflective spaces that direct the design of a learning agenda. This form of support will ensure that complex needs are met with coordinated care for all grantees and that grantees are given an opportunity to deliver feedback to us, the Learning Partner so that we can improve too.
Establishing sustainable provision and long-lasting partnerships: These will be cemented using evidence-based practices and approaches, such as sharing learning to influence policy and other sustainable funding routes nationally. This change will allow organisations from the UK-wide youth and mental health sectors to build their capacity, take part in opportunities to meet and form partnerships and sustain this model of provision beyond the project.
All of these are enhancing the response to the core issues of young people’s mental health by ensuring grantees can provide effective support to young people in their communities, and learn as they go about what works for them, in their context and across the sector.
Going beyond the project to create a sustainable future of impact
Looking ahead, we’ll co-design the next phase of engagement with grantees, developing a package of virtual workshops to embed learning into their organisations. Building on their feedback, we’ll work collaboratively to develop a digital toolkit of resources to support current and future learning, providing a platform for sustainable knowledge transfer within the youth work sector. The learning from this support will help guide the development of the Thriving Minds grant distribution.
Dr Tom Gallagher-Mitchell, Lead for Service Improvement at Dartington Service Design Lab said: “Creating opportunities for organisations to reflect on their practice and review how their services are shaped to support positive outcomes for young people is a key area for Thriving Minds. In our role as Learning Partner with UK Youth, we’ve developed opportunities in the first year of the fund to help grantees build strong foundations for evidencing their impact, with a focus on effective Theory of Change and use of evidence and data. We’re looking forward to bringing grantees together in shared conversations to further understand the needs of young people accessing youth services, and to reflect on areas of success and challenge in 2023”.
We'll be meeting at an in-person residential event in January 2023 to provide space for further learning and sharing, networking and deepening understanding of effective practices related to supporting young people’s mental health and wellbeing. Improving connections between grantees will ultimately build cohesion, develop capacity between workforces and form a more integrated and interdisciplinary approach to support young people and professionals in youth work. We hope this paves the way for wider systems and sectors to adopt this sustainable model of support, continuous development, learning and integrated practice.
To find out more about our work with UK Youth, please contact: Tom Gallagher-Mitchell or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest news and updates.