Impact Report 2024

I’m delighted to introduce West Sussex Mind’s Impact Report 2024. I got help through Families in Mind, West Sussex Mind’s service for parents with young children, and the support I received has been truly life-changing.

I’ve gone from feeling anxious and isolated after the birth of my second son to learning to take better care of myself and becoming a more confident parent. I’ve built my own connections and friends in the community, expanded my support network and I’ve started doing meditation and yoga for self-care. And I’ve started helping other people by volunteering with West Sussex Mind.

I completed the charity’s brilliant peer support training, and now I support a Families in Mind group once a week, give peer support to others and run online mindfulness groups for adults. I find it incredibly rewarding to use my own lived experience to help others on their recovery journey. And peer support has a powerful ripple effect: I supported someone who was struggling with anxiety, confidence and taking the bus independently. After five individual peer sessions, including taking the bus together, this person is thinking about volunteering herself!

My voluntary work is also building my confidence, skills and experience towards my longer term aim of getting back into paid employment. West Sussex Mind has given me faith in myself again, a wonderful community of fellow parents and it’s a place where I can grow and thrive. I’m proud of the difference West Sussex Mind makes to people’s lives. This Impact Report provides a snapshot of some of that invaluable work over 2023-24 and I hope that you enjoy it.

During 2023-24, we supported more people than ever before, continuing to provide high-quality mental health support to meet growing demand. From individual and group support, to social activities that build confidence and offer peer support, we aim to empower people with mental health problems to learn to manage their mental health and wellbeing.

We’re also finding new ways to deliver support. We’ve trained 27 peer volunteers through a ten-week programme, funded by East Head Impact, to use their lived experience to support others, offering people opportunities to progress into volunteering, paid employment and education and training. The programme has not only been invaluable for the trainees’ self-esteem and recovery journey, but also benefits our service users, giving increased opportunities for peer support.

In November 2023, we launched supported self-help, a six-week guided programme, to help people better understand and manage their mental health. Originally developed and trialled by national Mind, we were the only local Mind on the South Coast to be selected to offer this service. We’ve supported 119 people through supported self-help since it was launched, providing another flexible option for support with 20-minute calls, information and resources over six weeks.

An important part of our strategy is to reach out to communities that may feel excluded from mental health support for a variety of reasons. We developed a model for this work, employing specialist outreach workers with lived experience of mental health to connect with these communities and introduce them to our services. Rather than expecting people to come to us, we proactively reach out to those who aren’t finding support with us, but may need us most.

This year we completed our Adur outreach project, focused on Lancing, Sompting, Fishersgate and Southwick, where we knew people weren't accessing mental health support and were struggling with the cost of living. We saw a spike in the numbers of people from these areas getting support with us and we have embedded this approach into our day-to-day work.

We also extended our work with refugees in West Sussex from support for Ukrainians resettling here to working with other refugee and asylum communities in Chichester. We established a new partnership with Sanctuary in Chichester to offer mental health support to Afghan, Syrian and Eritrean refugees among others.

We established new peer support groups for the LGBTQIA+ community in Southwick in response to feedback about the need for peer-led mental health groups in the community and feedback we received at Worthing Pride. The groups bring people from the LGBTQIA+ community together in a safe environment to share experiences and get mutual support and we are hoping to establish groups at our other locations.

Our training offer is an important part of our work to increase understanding about mental health among people who live and work in West Sussex and to reduce the stigma that often prevents people getting support. Highlights included:

• Developing courses to support refugee mental wellbeing, including a programme for Ukrainian refugees funded by West Sussex County Council

• Training 116 people at Citizens Advice and other partner organisations as part of a project with Horsham Council exploring the link between poverty and mental health

• Delivering Adult and Youth Mental Health First Aid training to staff at West Sussex County Council, local businesses and partner agencies

• Bespoke training for businesses to promote mental health in the workplace.

During 2023-2024, we raised more money than ever before – £256,000 – to continue our priority services. This was a significant achievement in a particularly challenging and increasingly competitive fundraising environment for charities. Fundraising helps us reach more people and some of our projects are financed entirely by fundraising. So we rely greatly on the generosity and support of our donors and fundraisers for much of our work.

Here are some of the year’s fundraising highlights:

• Our second Mental Elf 5k festive fun run attracted over 200 runners and walkers to Worthing seafront and raised over £9,200 for our charity. It also included a celebrity appearance from local Olympian Sally Gunnell OBE who started the run for us and the event was featured on ITV News Meridian.

• An exciting abseil challenge at Peacehaven Cliffs, our first ever joint fundraising event with Safe in Sussex

• A generous £10,000 donation from local accountancy firm Carpenter Box

• Jacobs Steel’s annual ball in aid of West Sussex Mind and Guild Care, which raised over £8,800 for our charity.

In 2023-24, West Sussex Mind spent £3,300,705, which was an 20% increase on 2022-23. Our principal funders were:

• NHS Sussex Integrated Care Board
• GP practices and primary care networks
• West Sussex County Council and other local district and parish councils
• National Lottery Community Fund.

Much of our work was funded by contracts to provide specific services, for example, the National Lottery Community Fund supports our Families in Mind service, while the NHS funds our adult mental health services and Staying Well, our crisis support service in Worthing.

We also secured grant and trust funding from a number of organisations throughout the year to fund specific projects and services. These included:

• £80,871 over two years from Friends of Midhurst Community Hospital Trust to fund Mental Health First Aid training and peer support work

• £242,000 from national Mind to fund our new supported self-help service for two years

• £14,997 from Macmillan Cancer Support to fund a cancer care and mental health project within local Polish communities

• £61,000 from West Sussex Council to continue our Self-Harm Learning Network.

Our key goals for 2024-25 are to:

• Make sure that people know about our services and that support is available
• Offer and develop high-quality, flexible mental health support in the towns and rural communities of West Sussex, provided through a range of channels
• Raise awareness about mental health in local communities across West Sussex to combat stigma and encourage people to come forward for support
• Expand our prevention and early intervention work, targeting communities who need this most and reducing the pressure on the NHS
• Build a strong West Sussex Mind team, organisation and brand
• Create and co-produce our next five-year strategy for 2025-2030.

This year, we supported more people than ever before and we've continued to find innovative ways to meet the increasing demand for support. A great example of this is the step change we’ve seen in our use of volunteers. Thanks to our partnership with East Head Impact, we trained 27 peer volunteers during 2023-24 through a bespoke training programme. These volunteers are having a significant impact supporting people across the organisation and we are grateful to them for their commitment and passion.

We continue to put our service users at the heart of everything we do and I’m excited about where this will take us. Addressing health inequalities among different communities is at the forefront of all our work, and our outreach projects with refugee, Polish and Ukrainian communities are great examples of this, as are our cost of living initiatives.

I’m delighted that our Families in Mind service has continued to get support from the National Lottery Community Fund. Having intervention and support for parents during children’s early years can be truly life-changing and prevents problems escalating in the future.

The successful appointment of our new CEO, Kerrin, has been another significant achievement this year. It’s been a busy and at times challenging year and Kerrin has led with professionalism and good humour, continuing to put people and communities first in everything we do. I would like to thank him for the way in which he has seamlessly moved into his new role.

Finally, I'd like to say a huge thank you to our dedicated staff, volunteers, trustees, supporters and funders for their hard work and continuing commitment to our charity.