HFEH Mind wins Mind Network Excellence Award
We’re thrilled to announce that we have been awarded a Mind Network Excellence Award to recognise our work in ‘Promoting positive attitudes towards mental health’.
The Mind Network Excellence Awards are given to those local Minds who have been reviewed for the Mind Quality Mark (Mind’s quality assurance standard for local Minds) in the past year, and seen to go above and beyond expectations to a standard that judges deem to be excellent.
Judges for the awards described our work in promoting positive attitudes towards mental health as “impressive and admirable”.
What is the Mind Quality Mark?
The Mind Quality Mark (MQM) is a rigorous quality assurance standard which sets the bar of good practice and legal compliance for all organisations in the Mind Federation.
Once every three years, local Minds are reviewed against the MQM standards. The reviews are led by people with lived experience of mental health problems and senior leaders from other local Minds. They are based on a robust assessment of documentary evidence as well as interviews with and survey responses from trustees, staff, volunteers, and people who use services.
To achieve the Mind Quality Mark, local Minds must be well-run organisations delivering safe, life-changing support for people with mental health problems.
Promoting positive attitudes towards mental health
A core commitment to human rights and addressing health inequalities is the foundation to everything we do here at HFEH Mind. This commitment is shared by a diverse board, leadership and staff team, who are united in tackling negative attitudes to mental well-being and discrimination in all communities but particularly in those racialised and marginalised communities we serve.
We developed targeted projects to raise awareness and tackle stigma in racialised and marginalised communities including ‘The World I Want to See’ project created with Cephas Williams, founder of the Black British Network.
We’ve worked hard on aligning our awareness raising and promotional activities with national campaigns to achieve the most impact, and spread positive messages through community events, free training, and delivering workshops for schools. Internally, our Wellbeing Champions promote and celebrate positive mental health stories from staff and volunteers.
One challenge we faced was ensuring the workforce had a deep understanding of racialised and marginalised communities. Addressing this involved the intentional and planned recruitment of people from those communities, with experience of delivering high quality mental health and wellbeing services. We successfully secured funding that allowed us the freedom to innovate and trial new ways of working, including collaboration with grassroots community groups.
These collaborations have helped us to promote positive attitudes to mental health and challenge discrimination by co-producing campaigns and projects with racialised and marginalised communities to ensure these are culturally appropriate and have maximum impact.
The work doesn’t stop here though – we’re excited to build on all we have achieved so far and reach more of our communities and tackle the mental health inequalities and stigma they sometimes face.
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Posted on: 23rd February 2023
