The Diana Award – #YoungAndBlack Changemakers
Insights from an commissioned evaluation of The Diana Award’s Anti-Racist and Anti-Sexual Bullying Programmes
This project is now closed
#YoungAndBlack Changemakers
Opportunities for young people to take part in social action activities that aim to reform mental health services for people from racialised communities.
The project in numbers
#YoungAndBlack Changemakers was a three-year programme developed and delivered by UK Youth, the Centre for Mental Health and the Diana Award with majority funding from the People’s Postcode Recovery Fund and Comic Relief Changemaker Fund.
The programme aimed to tackle racial inequalities that exist in the access to, and quality of, mental health support for young people from all racialised communities, by placing them at the heart of reimagining and redesigning a mental health support service that is fit for purpose and culturally competent. 16–25-year-olds from racialised communities were supported to develop proposals that improve wellbeing provision for their peers.
The grant from Spirit of 2012 to The Diana Award supported The Respect Programme, focusing on embedding systems change. This involved taking the outputs from the social action programme and disseminating them across the youth sector, formal education sector, clinical settings and policy arenas, using the reach and influence of the three national partners and amplifying the voices of young people who have the experience of the services and issues that affect them. The grant funded anti-racist bullying training for over 1,000 secondary school students in England.
Project aims
- Promote positive mental health in young people from racialised communities
- More decision making power is shared with young people from racialised communities
- Young people from racialised communities build emotional resilience and peer support networks
- Practitioners working with young people gain knowledge and confidence to better support young people from racialised communities
- Influence councils and the government to take on young people’s ideas in the ways they run mental health service for racialised young people
