Impact Report 2025

It’s a pleasure to introduce the latest Impact Report from West Sussex Mind, a charity that has become an important part of my life.

I’ve had a difficult journey with mental health, experiencing anxiety from my early teens and struggling with an eating disorder. My mum and dad tried to get me support through Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) when I was 16, but I was deemed “not ill enough” to be treated and didn’t get the help I needed.

Early on, I knew that I wanted to become the person I had needed when I was young. I was dismissed by a lot of people – by my teachers, by CAMHS, by my peers – and I wanted to be someone people could go to for help. So I began learning about mental health.

After being diagnosed with Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder as an adult, I began studying for a Psychology degree with the Open University. I went on to do a Masters in Psychology, Mental Health and Wellbeing and while getting support for my mental health during lockdown, my support worker suggested I try volunteering. After volunteering with SHOUT, the text-based support service, for two years, I began volunteering with West Sussex Mind’s Staying Well crisis support service, making people feel welcome and safe.

I found it really rewarding and a colleague suggested I apply for the charity’s peer volunteer training. The training has been transformational. Doing the eight-week course has given me my confidence back. I feel like I’ve finally taken ownership of my past and made it useful.

I’m now doing paid work with West Sussex Mind, using my lived experience to help others on their journey. I have the occasional mental health wobble, but it doesn’t derail me anymore. I’m learning all the time through my work in a wonderfully supportive environment and I’m becoming what I wanted to be – that person I wish I had been able to talk to. I thank West Sussex Mind for the opportunity and hope that you enjoy reading about its work.

We supported more people than ever before during 2024-25. 7,766 people got support with us, that’s a 22.8% increase on 2023-24, and testament to the expansion of our services to help meet ever-growing demand. We continued to support adults, children and young people, families and older adults through individual and group sessions and a flourishing programme of social activities to help people connect and build self-esteem in a supportive environment.

A wonderful example of our deep community links and our holistic approach to wellbeing is the community allotment we created this year, so that service users, employees and volunteers could grow produce together and share it with the community. As well as providing a wellbeing haven for service users, the plot is helping to spread awareness about mental health among the wider allotment community and allowing people to connect outdoors.

Our mental health workers continued to support people in GP surgeries across West Sussex with 1,489 adults receiving mental health support in their familiar surgery environment with goal-orientated plans that help people understand and manage their mental health better in the long term.

A major change during 2024-25 was the introduction of a clinical mental health practitioner from Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust to our Staying Well crisis support service in Worthing, allowing us to transform to a walk-in service for anyone experiencing a mental health crisis. This change was carefully introduced to all the Staying Well centres across Sussex, including those run by our partners, reducing the pressure on A&E and blue-light services.

Against a backdrop of rising mental health demand among children and young people, we continue to do our utmost to support 8 to 25 year olds and their parents and carers.

• Our young people’s service supports 16 to 25 year olds through the crucial child to adult transition period and provides one-to-one and group support through our main locations and community venues, as well as in schools and colleges.

• Our specialist children and young people’s social prescribers support 8 to 17 year olds in GP surgeries across West Sussex, including the addition of practices in rural North Chichester this year.

• Our parenting service supports parents and carers who are concerned about their child or young person’s mental health and emotional wellbeing, increasing their knowledge and understanding and helping them connect with other parents for peer support.

We’ve continued to innovate in our approach to young people’s mental health, securing funding from national Mind to work with a steering group of experts, five other local Minds and 14 young people to co-produce a trauma-informed care approach and toolkit. We'll use this learning to train other Minds and community organisations to work with young people in a trauma-informed way.

West Sussex Mind is also a “link organisation” in a research initiative, called CATALYST, which rethinks support for young people’s wellbeing in the community. As part of this project, we will cascade the psychologically informed approach we have learned to selected partners, enabling even more young people to get support in the community. Through these and other initiatives, our specialist team continues to develop to make youth mental health a top priority for our charity.

We know that many in our community face barriers to accessing mental health support for a whole host of reasons. So we look at information about who is getting support with us and measure that against West Sussex Census data to identify gaps and develop ways to reach out to communities who may need us the most. For example, we know that there is a link between poverty and mental health and minority communities and mental health. It's important to us that we support people facing multiple disadvantage and that our support is truly inclusive.

During 2024-25, we’ve continued to support local Polish communities and help them navigate local mental health services and reduce stigma. We’ve also extended our work with refugees, supporting Ukrainian refugees, and working in partnership with Sanctuary in Chichester to support refugees and asylum seekers of 23 different nationalities. And we've secured a contract to provide mental health support for resettled refugees for two years across West Sussex, many of whom have experienced trauma and are struggling with issues, such as loneliness, stress and depression.

We’ve extended our monthly peer support groups for the LGBTQIA+ community and now offer these in person and online across all our locations. And we continue to support Pride events to raise awareness about our help, attending Worthing, Chichester and Witterings Pride in 2024-25.

Conscious of the stigma that surrounds men's mental health and the disparity in women and men seeking support with us (roughly two-thirds to one-third), our teams are working to reach more men directly and through partnership. A good example of this was through a partnership with male carers charity, Dad La Soul, in which a peer support worker from our Families in Mind team attended Dad La Soul meet-ups to spread the word about our support. This resulted in an increase in men finding support with Families in Mind from 4% to 9% in 2024-25.

We’ve also started our journey towards becoming an anti-racist organisation with experts by experience from local minoritised communities helping us to develop an action plan to make this a reality.

Our training team expanded its activities this year, increasing the number of people receiving our training from 6,111 in 2023-24 to 9,429 in 2024-25. From training people to spot signs of crisis and support colleagues, friends or family, to delivering bespoke mental health training to businesses and organisations around workplace wellbeing, our specialist team delivers a large range of courses. These include Mental Health First Aid, suicide prevention, self-harm and other courses for professionals, businesses and parents and carers.

Highlights for 2024-25 include:

• A training programme for Ukrainian refugees, their hosts and volunteers working with refugees, funded by West Sussex County Council

• Delivery of the Pan-Sussex Self-Harm Learning Network to support professionals, parents and carers to understand self-harm and better support young people

• Mental Health First Aid training for NHS Sussex primary care staff

• Two menopause courses at West Sussex County Council – one for staff and one for managers – to raise awareness and give managers tools to support staff during menopause and perimenopause.

It’s a challenging environment for fundraising: the cost of living is impacting donors and fundraisers and there’s greater competition for grants. However, against this difficult background, we are pleased to raise £695,000 this year towards our existing priority services and developing new projects and services.

Some of our fundraising highlights in 2024-25 included:

• £78,562 over three years from the F Glenister Woodger Trust, enabling us to provide mental health peer support for children and young people in the Witterings and surrounding areas, as well as multiple training courses aimed at parents, carers and organisations supporting children and young people in the area. We are sincerely grateful to the trust for this funding; because it runs over three years, this funding enables us to plan better for the future.
• A new event, called September Swim, which invited people to swim 5km throughout the month of September to raise money for us. Forty people took part in September 2024 and they raised £6,392
• Our third Mental Elf 5k fun run and walk had to be cancelled this year due to Storm Bert, but our resilient supporters completed their runs remotely for us, still raising just under £9,000 for our charity. What a bunch of superstars!
• Our first ever Sky Dive event, in which nine brave skydivers together raised £3,031 for our charity
• A Father Christmas at Goddenwick Farm event, which raised over £4,000 and brought the magic of Santa to local children.

In 2024-25, West Sussex Mind spent £3,714,091 to provide continuing care for people who need our support and to develop new projects and services. This was an 12.5% increase on our spending in 2023-24. 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.

These sources of funding are generally linked to specific services. For example, the National Lottery Community Fund supports Families in Mind (and awarded us another three years of funding from July 2025), while the NHS funds our adult mental health, youth mental health and Staying Well crisis support service. Other organisations fund specific projects, such as East Head Impact’s funding of our peer volunteer training, offering pathways to volunteering, employment and education for people experiencing mental health issues.

We are operating in a financially challenging environment, where we face higher than normal inflationary pressures, alongside efficiencies in many of our contracts. So we are looking to diversify our sources of income through a new fundraising strategy and continue to work alongside our voluntary partners to campaign for fair increases, highlighting the importance of preventative mental health support.

During 2024-25, we co-produced and launched a new strategy and mission statement for the next five years. We’re proud of what we feel is a co-produced vision for 2025-2030. We consulted with trustees, partners, employees and volunteers, and based our key aims on local and national data, structured interviews with key partners, feedback from trustee away-days and strategy roadshows across our key locations.

The new strategy outlines five key aims, each with a series of goals attached to them:

Our mental health services: Mental health services for adults, children and young people are transforming. We will provide a key leadership role in enabling this, co-producing services that deliver transformative support in our communities.

Addressing health inequalities: We want to ensure that everyone has access to the mental health support they need and deserve by working to reduce health inequalities.

Tackling mental health stigma: We will empower people to share their experience and will amplify their voices to help tackle prejudice and stigma.

Our people: We will build an inclusive organisational culture and supportive workplace, where people are proud to be part of West Sussex Mind. We will invest in opportunities for progression.

Our organisation, finance and buildings: Our organisation will be innovative, efficient and financially secure, minimising any negative impact on the environment.

In order to achieve our strategy, our priorities for 2025-26 include:

• Campaigning for the children and young people social prescribing model to be adapted in mental health services for 8-17 year olds

• Understanding the ethnic disparity in our service offer

• Reducing the stigma around men’s mental health and reaching more men with our services

• Embedding trauma-informed practice across West Sussex Mind

• Integrating our adult services into Sussex-wide neighbourhood mental health teams with our partners

• Creating our plan to be a truly anti-racist organisation

• Developing a new fundraising strategy to diversify and grow our income.

It’s been another busy and inspiring year at West Sussex Mind. A significant milestone was the creation of our new strategy 2025-30, which was co-produced with our employees, fellow trustees, people who use our services, partners and volunteers. I was impressed with how many people engaged and offered their insights to help us co-produce a new strategy and mission statement, reflecting where we are as an organisation and where we want to be.

This was also the year in which West Sussex Mind was assessed for its Mind Quality Mark, a process all local Minds go through every three years to remain part of the Mind Federation. Following robust self-assessment, evidence gathering and a site visit from the MQM review team, we were awarded our MQM with some fabulous feedback: “West Sussex Mind is an innovative organisation with a wealth of strengths... The review team were impressed by the passion, commitment and values demonstrated by the whole workforce and commend what is clearly a positive and inspiring culture.”

The year hasn’t been without its challenges, of course, and it’s a time of significant change in the Sussex health system. But this has prompted us to work and act differently and to forge stronger relationships with key partners, which has meant we’re well placed for new commissioning opportunities.

During in a year in which we supported 7,766 people – 22.8% more than the previous year – and innovated to meet demand, I’d like to personally thank all our dedicated employees, volunteers, trustees, partners and funders for their continued hard work and support for our charity. We couldn’t do what we do without you!