Alongside the work we’ve been doing externally, we have been focused on building a strong sense of community within YoungMinds – both with each other as colleagues and with young people. Our Youth Panel have worked alongside the Senior Leadership team and Trustee board to guide decisions and helped to make sure we are listening to and involving young people throughout our work. Our Youth Advisors have been involved in directing projects from recruitment to hosting events to campaigns to brand development. We keep striving to improve and help everyone at YoungMinds, both young people and staff, to feel welcome, valued, able to participate and listened to. Right now, there’s no expectation that things are going to get easier. We face a national emergency in terms of young people’s mental health, and too many young people can’t get support when they need it. There has never been a more urgent time for our work. Yet we face this challenge with optimism and open hearts. We see the passion, dedication and creativity in the young people and partners we work alongside to imagine and create a better future. Every young person we provide a platform for, every adult we help feel more confident, and every individual who no longer feels alone with their mental health moves us in the right direction.
Every young person who wants to can influence the decisions that affect their mental health.
Every young person who needs support - whether from the NHS, from local services or online - can get it.
Some of the key factors behind the rise in young people's mental health needs are reduced.
YoungMinds’ Youth Panel is a diverse group of 13 young people who get involved in the strategic decision-making or the organisation, bringing a youth perspective to the big decisions we make and challenging the leadership on our direction of travel.
The Panel participated in 40 activities this year, compromising of 238 individual actions. Among many activities, they recruited two new Directors, reviewed, and helped write our safeguarding and ethical fundraising policies, shaped our campaigning direction, and helped with the setup of key projects, and created a Theory of Change for our AJEDI Campaign. We’re so grateful for the commitment of our Panel and the huge role they’ve played in the successes we’ve achieved this year.
Our Activist Programme is where young people with lived experience of mental ill health come together to join our campaigns, shape our content, and speak out in the media and in parliament. They play an absolutely crucial role in keeping youth mental health high on the agenda, campaigning for change and making sure young people are authentically represented in our work.
Forty-five young people took part in at least one activity in the last 12 months, and on average, Activists took part in an impressive eight activities each. These included meeting MPs, telling their stories on national broadcast and print media, co-designing our Never Alone content, and coming together to help us write our new policy agenda.
Our Youth Advisory Group entered its second year and went from strength to strength. This is a paid programme, where a team of young people join staff teams as direct collaborators on key projects. They got involved in our strategy development, our movement building project, our Never Alone work and much, more. A key highlight was the group designing, producing, and speaking at our flagship event at the Bank of England to engage over 100 supporters and raise awareness of YoungMinds.
felt they made a positive contribution to young people’s mental health.
of those young people felt that making that contribution had had a positive impact on themselves.
rated their programme as ‘excellent’ or 'very good'.
When a young person is struggling with their mental health early support is vital. In fact, the earlier they can get support, the more effective that support usually is. But of the hundreds of thousands of young people affected by their mental health, most do not get support when they first need it.
Since 2019 we’ve been campaigning with partners in the Fund the Hubs coalition to make sure there’s an early support hub in every community in the UK. And we’ve seen excellent progress over the last 12 months. 15,000 YoungMinds campaigners signed a letter to the Chancellor, asking him to invest in the roll out of these hubs. Our Activists have also been actively engaging MPs and Ministers, bringing their real experiences to the heart of Government.
Our campaign has led to a commitment from the government to commit £5 million to fund a pilot of 24 early support hubs, with a view to a full roll out. We also secured a commitment from the Labour party that, should they form the next Government, they would commit to a full national roll out. We are delighted to have made these breakthroughs on a long-standing priority for our campaigning.
A key ask of our End the Wait campaign is to get a mental health support team (MHST) in every school in the country. Again, we secured a major breakthrough, getting the Government to increase their target
from 35% to 50% by 2027. The change in Government provides a key opportunity to push for more as we secured a pre-election commitment from Labour that they will roll these out across all schools.
Fight for Young Lives
This year, our media team and young Activists worked with mental health activist and media star Roman Kemp to produce an authentic look into the mental health crisis experienced by young people in the UK today. The documentary for BBC has given a phenomenally wide exposure and a unique insight into the problems faced by young people, treatments, and support available and the political solutions being offered.
The crisis in young people’s mental health has been getting worse each year, with prevalence rates hitting record levels last year. We believe that Governments have spent too long tinkering with a system that needs fundamental reform – and that fresh thinking is needed to bring the kind of change that will actually turn things around for young people.
We’ve been working with a group of 15 young people from our Activist programme to develop a bold, ambitious new policy agenda that we can bring to the new Government, so that we have the ideas and vision for a new way to tackle the mental health emergency. We are really proud of the work the young people have done, alongside our team, and excited to bring this to decision-makers this year.
