Transforming young women’s mental health:
Learning from the Pilgrim Trust’s Young Women in Mind programme
Adetola Obateru, Kadra Abdinasir, Sam Anderson, Huong Le, Bethan Bottomley and David Woodhead
Empowering Minds is our evaluation of the Young Women in Mind programme, launched by the Pilgrim Trust in 2021 to address the worsening mental health of young women aged 16-25.
Young women are facing stark inequalities in mental health. More than 30% of young women are living with a common mental health problem and they are twice as likely to have a mental health problem than young men. This is driven by social and economic pressures, including sexism, poverty, domestic abuse and the legacy of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Pilgrim Trust has responded to this by offering targeted and tailored mental health support for young women through projects across the north of England and Northern Ireland. Community-based projects offer support that recognises the impact of trauma on young women’s mental health and is tailored to the needs of racialised, LGBTQ+ and refugee young women, and those who have experienced sexual violence or domestic abuse.
The programme built collaboration and a strong network of funded projects. Services were designed to be safe, welcoming, and actively shaped by young women themselves, ensuring inclusivity and a sense of community.
What we found
Our evaluation found that the programme successfully improved mental health literacy, confidence, self-esteem, and daily wellbeing among participants. Multi-year, flexible funding enabled organisations to innovate, strengthen partnerships, and expand their reach. The structured community of practice strengthened collaboration, learning, and adaptability, helping projects draw from the experience of others to overcome challenges such as staffing pressures, increased demand, and language barriers.
“The youth workers are amazing, they support us non-stop and if we didn’t have the support of them today, I think a lot of girls would suffer a lot more.”
Young woman, M13 Youth Project
Seven key principles
The Young Women in Mind programme offers a model for effective, sustainable mental health support for young women. We identified seven key principles for creating a good age and gender specific service:
Key recommendations
We recommend sustaining and expanding age and gender specific services, embedding trauma-informed and coproduced approaches, and improving local and national policy coordination:
- Mental health service providers and commissioners should champion age and gender specific, trauma-informed support that places young women at the heart of service design and provides safe and inclusive spaces for young people.
- The UK and devolved Governments should include gender as a key element of future mental health strategies and plans and invest in large-scale research into effective strategies for improving young women’s mental health. They must also take action to reduce prevalence.
We need investment in bespoke support for young women in places they feel safe and listened to. Without it, young women will continue to be let down.
