We’ve been granted £350K for young people’s peer mentoring
Our new grant from the National Lottery Reaching Communities Fund will enable community peer mentoring co-developed with young people.
Young people in the UK have the lowest wellbeing in Europe, according to the 2024 Good Childhood Report.
Here at Anna Freud, we believe investing in prevention is the key to better mental health care. This means building good wellbeing for children by creating conditions that help them thrive.
One great way to do this is by connecting with your local community. This helps build healthy relationships, which are powerful protective factors for mental health and wellbeing.
So, we wanted to turn evidence into action and deliver a community peer mentoring programme that’s co-produced with young people and psychologically-backed. And we’re delighted that The National Lottery Community Fund has granted us £357,661 over three years to fund our project, AMBIT Peer Mentoring: Reaching Communities.
Rebecca Smith, our Deputy Programme Director for AMBIT (Adolescent Mentalization-Based Integrative Treatment), tells us more...
What will the peer mentoring scheme do?
We’ll bring together younger and older young people in their local communities. After receiving specialist training, mentors will help younger peers build confidence, strengthen relationships and navigate challenges they’re facing.
The programme is based on our AMBIT approach. At its heart is a simple idea: someone closer in age or experience might be better at creating a safe space where a young person feels supported by the mentor and comfortable opening up.
Rather than telling young people what to do, peer mentors will help them explore challenges, reflect on their experiences and develop their own solutions.
Who will the mentoring support?
The programme will be for young people experiencing discrimination or barriers to accessing support.
In the first phase of the project, we’ll partner with three organisations already doing incredible work in their communities: The Kite Trust, Centre 33 and Reaching Higher. Together, these organisations support young people facing a wide range of challenges. These include mental health difficulties, social isolation, housing insecurity and poverty. Our partner organisations also support disabled people, neurodivergent or LGBTQ+ people and young carers.
Because every community is different, each organisation will work with local young people to identify the needs that young people are facing in their community. Then, the mentoring will be tailored to what they’d like.
As well as supporting mentees, the programme will benefit the young mentors themselves. We piloted this model of mentoring with The Winch charity previously, and it showed us that mentors can develop confidence, communication skills and leadership experience, while mentees report feeling more connected and able to cope with life’s challenges.
How will the mentoring improve young people’s mental health?
The mentoring will help by building trust. AMBIT’s strength-based approach means prioritising the knowledge and expertise of the person seeking help. We use it to create the conditions for help to flow by building and sustaining epistemic trust, a special kind of trust that develops through relationships with others. Adverse experiences, trauma, or neglect can disrupt this process, leading to epistemic mistrust, which may persist into adulthood and affect social learning and adaptation.
Many people approach support with past experiences of not feeling seen or heard. AMBIT addresses this by applying mentalization, the effort to understand another person’s perspective and what drives their behaviour. This approach helps to foster trust and supports participants to become more open to receiving help.
How will the support be adjusted to the needs of minoritised groups?
Minoritised groups are more likely to have experienced epistemic injustice. Young people also often hold less power in society, which can limit their credibility when adults assume they know best and make decisions on their behalf.
This vulnerability is frequently compounded by additional individual, family or community-level challenges that further reduce opportunities for young people’s voices to be heard.
Through peer mentoring, we want to address these challenges by fostering a sense of belonging and creating opportunities for young people to connect with peers who understand some of what they're going through.
How will young people shape the scheme?
Young people will be involved in co-production at every stage. We’ll be working with The Kite Trust, Centre 33 and Reaching Higher, and each organisation will create a steering group of local young people who will help shape how the programme works, from identifying what challenges young people are facing in each community, to helping design activities and mentor training.
How are young people involved?
Young people will have opportunities to get involved in AMBIT Peer Mentoring: Reaching Communities by joining steering groups, helping shape the programme, becoming trained peer mentors or taking part as mentees.
The Kite Trust and Centre 33 are based in Cambridgeshire, and Reaching Higher is in South London. We'll be supporting these organisations through a staggered approach, beginning with Kite Trust, followed by Centre 33, and then Reaching Higher. Progress and opportunities to get involved will be promoted on social media by each organisation.
Finally, we’d like to say a heartfelt thank you from us to The National Lottery Community Fund for supporting youth mental health!
Find out more
Read about the AMBIT framework we used to develop this model.