Our strategic aims
At YoungMinds, it is our ambition for all of our work to be delivered alongside young people.
Our 72 Activists are at the heart of that ambition, using their lived experience of mental health to work with us to run campaigns, reach other young people and use their voices to influence real change.
During lockdown, we moved all of our youth engagement work to online spaces which still had a strong impact.
94% of those taking part in our programmes told us they felt they had made a positive contribution to young people’s mental health.
97% said their contribution made them feel better about themselves.
The Youth Panel help shape our future as a charity and achieve our mission. They talk about things like strategy, safeguarding, fundraising, organisational culture, risk management, data protection, brand and marketing.
They ask questions like:
In the words of our Youth Panellists
We launched a new programme, Activating Change, to train and support 12 Activists as media and public spokespeople.
These young people took part in 40 different opportunities, including a meeting with the Prime Minister, interviews in the Guardian and on ITV News, and contributed evidence to a Health Select Committee inquiry. With their media appearances being seen by an estimated audience of 40 million.
As the pandemic hit, we needed to understand the impact it was having on young people’s mental health.
Across three surveys, we saw 14,680 contributions from young people to give us a clear picture of the difficulties they were facing. Using this insight, we ensured their voices were heard in the media, in parliament and in Government.
We launched a campaign, Beyond Tomorrow, to gather public support for our clear calls for Government action.
We coordinated wider action too, including a letter from 30 sector organisations.
The result was significant policy change and additional funding, including a £4.2m package for mental health charities and an extra £79m for NHS children and young people’s mental health services.
We secured a suspension of Ofsted inspections in schools and extra wellbeing resources for teaching staff. We also secured the roll-out of a major, multi-million pound public health campaign through Public Health England to help young people look after their mental health.
We delivered the final year of our Amplified Project, working with the NHS to support and build participation in every part of the children and young people’s mental health system.
This project was delivered alongside 10 youth advisors and 8 parents/carer advisors and provided opportunities to engage with professionals at all levels right across the system. Over the course of 4 years of the project, we delivered training to over 1000 professionals, alongside 363 days of bespoke support to 12 clinical networks.
In addition to this we provided support for over 25 organisations across health and local government known as ‘trailblazers’, and created 15 practical resources for professionals.
In the final year of the programme we provided over 90 days of support specifically for the NHS England national children and young people’s mental health team, on a range of projects including the impact of moving mental health therapies to the focus on race equalities in patient care.