Active Citizenship - My Mental Health

The project was conceived under the premise that young people with ALN do not readily have personal, social and health education facilitated outside of mainstream education. Mental health issues are a growing issue among young people, and Public Health Wales, as a statutory provision, cannot cope with the demand for support. Generally, young people with ALN are not given the option to access support because of preconceptions that because of their ability, they will not benefit from the support being provided to them because they cannot understand. MMM will pioneer mental health awareness for those with ALN by using a peer-support model that engages young people by providing training to volunteers to help one another by disseminating entry-level mental health knowledge within the community.

The goal of the project is to reach as many young people as possible by means of an awareness raising workshop that provides information on what mental health is, simple coping mechanisms th

Mental health awareness is a requirement for young people worldwide. While so many suffer, few usually understand and this puts young people with ALN at an additional disadvantage. MMM will bridge this gap and ensure that young people with ALN (additional learning needs) are afforded the same level of mental health awareness as young people who do not have ALN. The purpose of the project is to promote social inclusion generally - removing the idea that anyone with ALN are at a disadvantage to those who do not.

A knowledge around volunteer management and a knowledge around working with young people who have ALN. The MMM initiative is not intended to be a substitue for mental health support services and thus no knowledge that surpasses an "awareness" level is reguired.

The MMM project aims to work with young people at every phase of the project delivery and integrate a focal element of active participation. Therefore, the initaitive has been divided into 5 phases to ensure that the young people who have chosen to participate are prepared at every stage; from their training to their delivery to other young people in the community.

Mental health is a sensitive subject for many young people, therefore a compassionate approach will be essential when implementing the MMM initiative.

Post-it notes

This is dependant on how you would like to replicate the initiative. The idea of active participation entails that volunteers develop their own resources to deliver to participants. What has been clicked in what we used but this is not at all exhaustive and is entirely adaptable to the needs of the person/ group replicating the project.

This is dependant on how you would like to replicate the initiative. The idea of active participation entails that volunteers develop their own resources to deliver to participants. What has been clicked in what we used but this is not at all exhaustive and is entirely adaptable to the needs of the person/ group replicating the project.

Post-it notes

This is dependant on how you would like to replicate the initiative. The idea of active participation entails that volunteers develop their own resources to deliver to participants. What has been clicked in what we used but this is not at all exhaustive and is entirely adaptable to the needs of the person/ group replicating the project.

Phase 1 - Volunteer Recruitment: We recruited several young people who were willing to deliver workshops to other young people in the community as our project volunteers. To recruit, we created a flyer and circulated it in the local area, we shared a post on social media, and we engaged with a local secondary school.

Phase 2 - Volunteer training: The second phase of the project included training our newly recruited volunteers in mental health awareness as well as facilitation skills to work with young people. In Gwent, our youth projects are partnered with Public Health Wales, and they disseminated the mental health awareness information to train our volunteers. This phase took roughly 3, 1-hour sessions that were delivered over 3 consecutive weeks.

Phase 3 - Content creation: The Youth Worker should encourage their volunteers to get creative with their newfound knowledge by creating interactive resources to deliver to other people in a workshop. The created resources included a definition activity where a definition of mental health was printed on a large piece of paper with keywords redacted, and the participants would try and fit the redacted words into the right place.

Phase 4 - Workshop delivery: The fourth phase of the project included our volunteers delivering their resources in a workshop format to local young people in youth work settings. Our approach was to organise three pre-organised workshops and invite young people to attend. We also worked with a local secondary school to deliver to their pupils as guest speakers to evaluate which approach worked best. In reflection, it was the latter. The workshop was split into three sections: What is Mental Health? Coping Mechanisms and Positive Wellbeing.

Phase 5 - Monitoring and evaluation: In the final stage, the comprehension surveys were evaluated to evidence the impact the project had on local young people. We collated the survey responses on an Excel spreadsheet.

Evaluation: We use a comprehension based survey that measures a participants understanding of the topics that we discuss before their participation and after. The questions that appear on the survey measure our project outputs, including mental health resilience and where to access reliable and informative resources. These are evaluated and recorded on an excel spreadsheet.

Follow up: We provided the teachers/ youth works with whom we worked with a feedback form to ascertain what they thought about the project.