Working with Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise Organisations

The Trust has developed a new programme to improve standards of care for all our community mental health services to ensure community services better meet the needs of adults who use our service, using learning from service user, carer and staff engagement activities and previous initiatives.

As part of this programme we are building on our work with community partners and strengthen our links with our voluntary, community and social enterprise colleagues, and are 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 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.

The process is equitable, accessible, and more streamlined to help smaller, more local services to compete for the funding.

Derek Tracy, Chief Medical Officer said: “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.