Do you live or support people in the north of Stoke on Trent?

Mental Wellbeing Grant enabling you to bring your local community together or to help others learn a new skill.

In 2010 NHS Stoke-on-Trent commissioned a Community Mental Wellbeing Assessment in the City’s Northern Neighbourhood. The exercise established levels of mental wellbeing and key local factors influencing mental health in the area, including the extent to which people were following the Five Ways to Wellbeing.

The Five Ways to Wellbeing is a set of messages aimed at improving the mental health and wellbeing of the whole population. The five messages were developed to reflect kinds of behaviour that people can undertake, and which evidence suggests leads to improvements in their mental health and wellbeing. The five ways to wellbeing are;

1. Connect
2. Be Active
3. Take Notice
4. Keep Learning
5. Give

The study found that those in the area with the poorest wellbeing were less likely to be following the five ways, supporting the case to do more to promote these messages to people who experience poorer wellbeing and to enable them to put them into practice.

Connect and Keep Learning were identified as the key drivers of mental wellbeing in this area of the City.

Other, broader means of improving people’s mental health include;

• Policy decisions which protect public mental health, and create mentally healthy settings
• Mentally Healthy Workplaces which are supportive and inclusive of people with mental health problems
• Good quality employment in mentally healthy workplaces
• Having an adequate income
• Having good quality housing
• Attaining a good standard of education (including emotional literacy) in mentally healthy schools, colleges and universities
• Having a voice in decision-making affecting their community
• Easy access to good quality green spaces
• Living in mentally healthy communities in which people feel included, valued and connected
• Having the emotional resilience and practical resources to benefit from the economic upturn.
• Having easy access to accurate information about mental wellbeing and mental ill-health, which enables self-help, early access to support and reduces stigma
• Having and using the skills and resources to achieve and maintain mental wellbeing, including adopting the 5 ways to wellbeing.

The Community Mental Wellbeing Assessment led to a number of recommendations including the development of opportunities for local people to ‘connect’ and ‘keep learning’. The purpose of this grant funding is to support people in the northern area of the City to identify and develop interventions to encourage social connection, learning and community involvement.
Projects should have a particular focus on people who (one or more):

• Experience poorer physical health inc long standing illness, health problems or disability which limits daily activities
• Lead less healthy lifestyles
• Have limited social contact
• Have no or lower qualifications
• Are not working
• Live in rented, including local authority, housing
• Are on a low income

live in the Northern Area of the city, corresponding to the former wards of:

• Tunstall

• Burslem North

• Chell & Packmoor

• Norton & Bradeley

Projects targeting areas identified as having higher numbers of vulnerable people will be especially well received.

Who Can Be Funded

• are meeting the needs of, or providing a service for the local community
• have been active for at least 6 months prior to the date of application
• have an income of less than £30,000 p.a. as an average of the past 3 years
• whose beneficiaries are people, (not animals, plants or the environment)
• Lobbying or campaign groups providing the community would be the main beneficiary

Who Can Not Be Funded

• Solely commercial ventures
• Party political activity
• Activity promoting religion or with a strong religious undertone
• Any project directly benefitting a religious building
• Work on a building if the occupant and has less than ten years left on the lease

To find out more, please visit the Staffs Foundation website for application forms, contacts  and further details