West Sussex Mind launches anti-racist commitment and organisation-wide action plan

West Sussex Mind is publicly declaring its commitment to becoming an anti-racist organisation. This is the culmination of over four years’ work – from our decision to make this a priority as part of our Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Equity work, and exploring barriers to support for local minoritised communities, to co-creating our first organisation-wide race equity and anti-racist action plan.

This is our public commitment:

West Sussex Mind is committed to becoming an anti-racist organisation. This means making anti-racism and racial equity part of everything we do, building an inclusive workplace and inclusive mental health services, and learning from lived experience and partners to achieve this. We will be transparent and accountable for this ongoing work.

We have published our race equity and anti-racist action plan on our website and we will continue to update this as we make changes to our culture, policies and processes as part of this ongoing transformation.

“Our anti-racist commitment is an important milestone for our charity, built on substantial groundwork and some difficult lessons along the way,” says Kerrin Page, CEO of West Sussex Mind. “We hope that, by leading this work with an open and honest approach and sharing our learning with others, we can inspire partners in the wider Sussex health system to reflect on anti-racism and join this difficult but important journey.”

Our health inequalities and anti-racist work

West Sussex Mind’s 2025-2030 strategic aim to reduce health inequalities is built on a foundation of anti-racism, recognising that mental health equity is impossible without directly challenging the systemic racism that limits access to care. We began looking at health inequalities five years ago and this has shaped our thinking about structural inequalities over time:

• 2021 – We identified that the number of Polish people finding support with West Sussex Mind didn’t reflect our local Census data and, recognising this as a failure in our reach, we recruited a dedicated Polish outreach and mental health worker. This role was about leading community engagement to identify and dismantle cultural and systemic barriers that had previously excluded the community from our care.

• 2022 – From looking at our service user data compared to local Census data, we recognised that the White British ethnic group was over-represented among our service users with under-representation from other minority ethnic groups. We decided that we needed to change our services and our internal culture to better meet the needs of minoritised communities and people of colour.

• 2022 – Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resettlement of Ukrainian refugees in West Sussex, we recognised an urgent need for specialised, trauma-informed care for this community. We appointed a Ukrainian outreach and mental health worker to ensure that Ukrainians arriving in West Sussex could access support that was culturally safe and responsive to their specific experiences of displacement.

• 2024 – We received funding from national Mind to support our anti-racism work and employed experts by experience to engage with local partners, research barriers to support and uncover ways to make our services more accessible to people from minoritised communities.

• 2025 – We held a workshop, run by external consultancy Diverse Matters, with 16 members of staff from all parts of our organisation to explore steps towards becoming an anti-racist organisation. These ideas contributed towards our first organisation-wide anti-racist action plan.

Facing uncomfortable truths

We have gained significant learning over this time and have been willing to confront uncomfortable truths. For example, when our experts by experience launched a community survey to identify barriers to support, the limited response (52 participants) was a stark reminder of the work we need to do to earn the trust of racialised communities in West Sussex.

“We recognise that the limited response wasn’t due to lack of interest from racialised communities, but was rather an indicator of deep-seated mistrust and historical barriers that exist between racialised communities and mental health services,” says Kate Scales, our deputy CEO. “It taught us that the onus is on us to build long-term, trusted relationships, rather than expecting communities to navigate systems that haven't historically served them.”

There was racial hatred directed at our social media channels during this period when we tried to gain wider reach for our survey. While our initial response to these comments was slower than it might have been, we acted by condemning this hatred publicly, reaffirming our commitment to becoming an anti-racist organisation, and implementing a more robust social media policy to ensure that we provide a safe environment for these conversations.

Although it received limited responses, the survey revealed some interesting findings:

• That many respondents in racialised communities had experienced a lack of cultural understanding among mental health professionals, which they felt was a barrier to understanding their needs and experiences

• That a lack of therapists and other mental health professionals of colour was a barrier to support - with people expressing a desire to see “people like them” in services, including at West Sussex Mind

• That knowledge about services was a barrier to support.

Establishing our priorities

Our experts by experience made a number of recommendations, based on their research, survey findings and their own lived experience, which we have taken on board to shape our anti-racist action plan. Two of these priorities include training for all our staff to build an anti-racist culture; and the need for greater representation of racialised communities within our services by attracting, recruiting and retaining diverse talent at all levels of West Sussex Mind. Both of these priorities are reflected in our action plan.

“The challenges we have encountered in this work haven’t deterred us; rather they have highlighted why becoming an anti-racist organisation is such urgent and vital work for our charity – and the scale of change required to make this happen,” concludes Kerrin Page, our CEO. “Guided and held to account by those with lived experience, we are committed to strengthening and building more culturally competent mental health services and to reducing health inequalities that are the product of systemic racism.”