Connecting Communities to Our Future Strategy - Meet Nicole

As part of the Trust’s Strategy Refresh, we set out to create genuine, two-way conversations about the future of South London and Maudsley, ensuring our next strategy reflects what matters most to the people we serve. With our current strategy, Aiming High, Changing Lives, ending in 2026, this engagement period was a vital opportunity to listen, learn and shape our future together.

A core principle of this work has been the importance of engaging meaningfully with local communities. We know that the best ideas and most impactful priorities come from lived experience - from our service users, carers, partners and the diverse communities we serve. By offering a range of ways to get involved, and by meeting people where they already are, we aimed to ensure a broad range of voices could genuinely shape our direction.

We also invited people to help rethink our Vision and Mission statements, recognising that these haven’t been updated in many years and should not just reflect organisational ambition, but the values, expectations and realities of those who use and interact with our services. The feedback we heard has been central in helping us reflect on what we stand for and how we move forward.

We used a blend of online and in-person events, briefings, commissioned focus groups and informal discussions creating opportunities for dialogue rather than simply collecting feedback. Much of this work was co-designed and co-delivered with partners, community leaders and service user and carer representatives, helping to ensure it was relevant, accessible and grounded in local knowledge.

Alongside this, we delivered bespoke workshops for specific groups, including young people and Spanish-speaking communities. Notable, we delivered a briefing session fully in Spanish to members of the Latin American Disabled People Project which allowed us to connect to this community on a much deeper and inclusive level to discuss the barriers the Spanish speaking community face when accessing mental health services and how to reflect this in the new strategy.

Overall, the engagement process has been strongly positive. We saw consistent participation across activities and received encouraging feedback on the variety of formats offered. People particularly valued the opportunity for open dialogue, the accessibility of community-based settings, and the mix of engagement approaches which allowed them to contribute in ways that suited them. This has reinforced the value of taking a flexible, partnership-led approach to engagement.

Together, this work reflects our commitment to partnership and doing engagement in a way that truly reflects the people we serve.