A mental health trust is investing more than £2m in voluntary community and social enterprises (VCSE) offering community services, with a significant amount going to local grassroots organisations to help shape a bold transformation of mental health care in the community.
The first wave of this funding has seen £800,000 of new partnership money has been approved to work with a range of local partners to improve services and support provided across communities in Lewisham.
The funding will make mental health support more easily available and responsive to the needs of the community, and help to residents access support more easily to try and avoid the need for urgent support.
South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, which provides mental health care across Croydon, Lambeth, Lewisham and Southwark has also made the process equitable, accessible, and more streamlined to help smaller, more local services to compete for the funding.
Professor Derek Tracy, Chief Medical Officer for the Trust, said: “This is an exciting, tangible result of the work we are doing to transform how we deliver care across our communities.
“We want to support our local mental health teams to work more closely with local voluntary and community organisations, helping people to get the right support to match their needs.
“We know local communities have great insight, great energy and great ideas on how to help support and heal those living in their neighbourhoods so to be able to work with them in such a practical way is a real change, especially in the way that we have been able to directly award funding to smaller, local groups who know not only who we are trying to help, but how we can do that with innovative ideas.”
The funding will deliver improvements for families and carers as well as adult service users.
As part of the Lewisham funding, awards were strategically prioritised to primarily Black-led local organisations to provide culturally relevant support for people from Black communities (African, Caribbean, Mixed and other) as Trust data shows that these communities experiences the poorest access and outcomes in services.
The investment in these services aim to support early intervention through relevant, unique and culturally relevant interventions and building on Trust’s work on its Patient and Carer Race Equality Framework and Anti-Racism Action Plan as well as supporting the implementation of the Lewisham Pilot model in one of our neighbourhoods.
Thirteen voluntary, community and social enterprise cooperatives have been successful providing a rich array of support for Black Caribbean, African, faith communities and other groups with projects to help through cooking, faith, peer support, sport and other recreational activities.
The successful organisations will provide support across different parts of Lewisham, some borough wide and others will support specific black communities.
The broader portion of this funding was allocated to support the delivery of primary and community mental health care and assertive outreach services through two established providers with experience in specialist care and outreach.
Those successful organisations are:
South East London MIND, delivering Primary Mental Health Care.
Together for Mental Wellbeing, delivering Assertive Outreach Services.
The Trust is transforming care across the three boroughs with each area creating local plans that address local challenges and draw on local partnerships. To ensure these are locally relevant and effective, each borough has created a local delivery group– co-led by a service user, community leader, and staff member – to co-design what these components look like in practice.
Work with the community is already underway in Lewisham to mobilise the investment in these new support services.
Adeniyi Aderinto, Interim Service Director for Lewisham, said: “We are really pleased that Lewisham has been the first area to progress this and it is thanks to the excellent partnership working we have here in the community.
“I would like to thank everyone who applied and hope to continue working with them in the future as well as the successful bidders.
“We are already starting to work out the detailed plans for rolling out these in the next month or two.
“This funding is really important in supporting local groups. But it is also important that we build on this exciting new approach and existing relationships and create new ones too as part of our community care transformation programme.”
