How UK Youth’s ‘Thriving Minds’ grantees are developing partnerships to address young people's mental health needs
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The youth sector plays a pivotal role in supporting the mental health and well-being of young people from diverse backgrounds. However, addressing the increasingly complex needs of young people and communities, whilst navigating competitive funding environments has placed additional pressure on the sector. The cost-of-living crisis, rising poverty and inequality, racism and discrimination, and a lack of opportunities continue to impact young people’s lives. This has been compounded by regular cuts in resources for youth services, and increased demand for alternatives to address the needs of young people who are struggling to access specialist support.
A longstanding approach to expanding service offers and increasing opportunities for young people in the youth sector has included partnership working. This has become increasingly crucial in times of economic austerity and higher demand for support. UK Youth’s Thriving Minds Fund, which spans from 2022-2025, set out to support 99 charities and not-for-profit youth organisations to investigate best practices around mental health and wellbeing support for children and young people. A key ambition of the Fund was to enable and strengthen connection and learning between those working within the youth sector.
As the Learning Partner on the Thriving Minds Fund, we’ve been working with UK Youth and grantees to generate evidence about what enables the sector to work better together and share knowledge around best practices to support young people experiencing mental health challenges.
Why do partnerships matter for Thriving Minds grantees?
According to grantees, partnerships enable them to achieve numerous goals, including better use of resources, building knowledge and sharing information, enhancement of work practices and management, improved service quality, and the development of new programmes (see the reasons below). These achievements, in turn, positively impact young people who benefit from their services. See below the types of partnerships grantees have adopted.
SHARING RESOURCES
Grantees have developed partnerships to share funding, physical resources and staff capacity or to simplify referrals and signposting. This enhanced accessibility to support and enabled more effective service delivery for children and young people.
SUPPORTING DELIVERY
Grantees have engaged in partnership, through co-delivery, to address gaps in knowledge, expertise and areas of focus. This allowed them to provide a more universal service that meets young people’s needs.
SHARING LEARNING
Some grantees collaborate in learning and evaluation partnerships to better understand and share best practices, refine organisational processes, and ultimately provide more effective support to young people.
INCREASING REACH
Grantees that engage in partnerships for expansion have scaled up their current delivery offer to reach more young people.
Grantees' perspectives on challenges in working in partnership
Grantees also shared barriers involved in forming and maintaining partnerships:
Power dynamics: The youth sector's role in supporting young people is complex, nuanced, and vast. However, grantees expressed that statutory services and other organisations do not always recognise the role of the youth sector. This can create inequitable dynamics that place expectations on the youth sector to provide support without appropriate funding and resources, whilst simultaneously not being seen as valued as other services.
Structure and flexibility: Statutory services and other organisations often follow very specific protocols and procedures. While this can be useful for tracking outcomes and accountability, it can be detrimental to working with other organisations to offer wrap-around support. Grantees underlined that young people’s lives are dynamic, their needs are complex and can evolve and change over time, emphasising a need to adapt and cater to support young people.
“Expectation from statutory services that our time and expertise can be accessed on a free/voluntary basis but then no core funding in the majority of project grants to give us capacity for this.””
Culture and language: We heard from grantees that some partnerships within the youth sector, or between the youth sector and other sectors, lack a common language or shared priorities, which can result in blurred roles, lack of accountability and a slip in the quality of support.
“Capacity is a big part of maintaining working partnerships; organisations are all so busy delivering their own work and caught in a continuous cycle of applying, monitoring, and reporting, it can be difficult to get the time to fulfil everything.””
Capacity: Youth organisations often struggle to engage in partnerships due to the stretch on staff time, who often need to prioritise service delivery and meet various reporting requirements. This can make it challenging to offer time to potential partners, or even establish partnerships to begin with, despite the value these could add in the long-term.
Financial resources: Capacity challenges are related to limited financial resources. Partnerships are not without a cost. Funding for 'systems leadership' and collaborative efforts is both valuable and essential and must be appropriately financed and resourced. Currently, there is an expectation that the charity sector undertakes this work without adequate funding.
“There needs to be mutual interest and understanding of each other’s organisation. Others may be reluctant to connect, or don’t take the time to understand our approach, and explore how we can support each other.”
Competitive and short-term funding: Funding cycles are often competitive and short-lived, so organisations need to guard resources and stretch capacity to deliver support to young people. This competitive nature harms establishing and maintaining partnerships as it can result in organisations working against each other rather than with each other. Similarly, organisations may feel pressure to focus on their own goals within partnerships instead of working in tandem to reach shared goals or supporting each other to reach individual goals.
What conditions enable cross-sector collaboration?
Understanding the conditions that enable effective and sustainable partnerships is essential. The Thriving Minds Fund has sought to create these conditions. Grants are multi-year, unrestricted and flexible, giving grantees the time and flexibility required to develop and refine their organisational strategies. They are also able to take time to explore potential partnerships, enabling them to be more strategic in starting and maintaining these collaborations. Thriving Mind's wrap-around offer also includes access to training and resources, action learning sets, and regional and national events focused on learning and collaboration.
Given the pivotal role of the youth sector, it is essential for funders and practitioners to think about the contexts they work in, and what they can do, together, to create the conditions for cross-sector collaborations to grow. In doing so, we can create thriving futures for children and young people.
On the 7th of November 2024, UK Youth launched the new Joined Up Institute. A learning and collaboration initiative that will get the best evidence of great practice into the hands and daily routines of people from all sectors.
For more information about UK Youth’s Thriving Minds Fund, please contact Sarah Lewis at Sarah@ukyouth.org
For more information about Learning Partnerships, please contact Arielle Garton at arielle.garton@dartington.org.uk.