Mental Health Fund
For years, insights from frontline workers and organisations in our Frontline Worker Survey have consistently shown there is inadequate access to mental health support for people experiencing homelessness. This missing support is vital to help people secure and keep a safe place to live.
In 2022, 75% of frontline staff described accessing mental health support for people they worked with as ‘difficult’ or ‘very difficult’. As a result, we set up a Mental Health Fund in 2023 to support three organisations that address highlighted gaps in provision.
The focus of the fund is to support organisations to provide targeted mental health support outside healthcare settings. It will assist people who are struggling with their mental health and addiction or the effects of trauma and are at critical transition points in their housing journey. The relationship between mental health and homelessness is deeply interconnected, with each often exacerbating the other. Mental health issues can not only lead to homelessness but also be worsened by structural factors like lack of support, poverty, and housing instability.
Through the fund, we allocated £223,399 for the first year of multi-year funding for the three organisations who provide this much needed support, and over £500,000 in total.
The funding was allocated to:
Rowan Alba’s Psychology in Hostels, in Edinburgh, a project that will embed a clinical psychologist in two supported accommodation homes to deliver targeted mental health support to 45 people with long-term experience of homelessness and trauma.
MAC- UK and Look Ahead’s Mental Health and Homelessness partnership, in London and Kent, a project that provides an integrated team of psychologists, practitioners, youth workers, and academics in two of Look Ahead’s intensive support accommodation services, catering for over 100 young people aged 16-25.
Platfform’s Community Coaching, in Cardiff and Newport, a one-to-one coaching support project for people transitioning from two 24-hour staffed mental health crisis houses, back into the community.
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“Often people are asked to move services, and this requires people to build new relationships and retell their story. We often find people slip through the cracks here and return to services that they trust but from which they may no longer be able to access support.”
Frontline worker