Larger charities have a major opportunity to tackle mental health inequalities locally through working alongside smaller community groups, a new evaluation has found.
Centre for Mental Health’s Growing the grassroots reports on a programme led by South East London Mind, which grant-funded local community groups in the London boroughs of Lewisham and Greenwich to provide wellbeing support in their communities.
By creating accessible grant funding programmes, the report says that larger charities can enable smaller groups to deliver effective mental health support to marginalised communities.
The report from Centre for Mental Health says that some communities face multiple barriers to effective and equitable mental health care, and may find mainstream support unhelpful or inaccessible. Smaller community and grassroots groups are often best placed to meet the needs of their own communities. However, they may not have the infrastructure or resources to be directly funded by more traditional commissioning.
The projects funded included online support for people from Black African and Caribbean communities, mindfulness workshops for people from the Nepalese community, and nature-based activities from young people who identify as LGBTQ+. All of the groups involved face multiple barriers to mainstream mental health care, with 65% of respondents saying they wouldn’t know where to seek support if these services were not available.
The evaluation also found that smaller community organisations face major challenges to survival. They often rely on short-term funding which can lead to the loss of vital support in communities and make it harder to build trust. The report calls for larger charities, foundations and commissioners to use grantmaking powers to get funding where it is most needed, and to consider longer-term funding offers to make smaller organisations’ work more sustainable.
Andy Bell, chief executive at Centre for Mental Health, said: “Mental health is made in communities. So getting mental health promotion and support into communities, led by and for the people, is crucial to dismantle deeply entrenched inequalities. South East London Mind has demonstrated how a larger charity can partner with community organisations to make a big difference, even with quite small amounts of funding. It’s vital that approaches like this are not one-off initiatives but routine and sustained across the country.”
Ben Taylor, chief executive at South East London Mind, said: “It’s been brilliant to work in partnership with a wide range of grassroots community organisations in South East London and to be able to support and fund their creative, impactful approaches to addressing mental health inequalities. We’ve been particularly impressed by the way they’ve built on their strong connections within local communities to support groups that have historically been under-served by mental health services.”
Tracy Durrant, managing director at Everyone’s a Singer, said: “Being a recipient of this grant has allowed us to deliver two programmes of Finding Harmony, our Singing for Wellbeing initiative which has helped us bring wellbeing and mental health resources to our communities in Greenwich and bring people together through music.”
