Young People’s Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing – Discovery College

Young People’s Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing – Discovery College

Issue date: 6th March 2023

Funding amount: £302,500 per annum

Funding duration: Initially 2 years with an option to extend by 1 year

Funding locations: Newham, City & Hackney and Tower Hamlets

Funding applications return deadline: 23:59 on 5/4/23

On behalf of East London Foundation NHS Trust (ELFT), Compass Wellbeing CIC invites local voluntary, community, and social enterprise organisations to come forward, as part of ELFT’s continuing commitment to early intervention, early help and to bolster emotional health and wellbeing in the communities it serves with children and adolescent mental health services.

Organisations are invited to express an interest in establishing a Discovery College for east London.  This offer is to introduce the establishing adults service offer of a ‘Recovery College’ to young people, for more information, see:

The Discovery College is an initiative that aims to provide a more holistic offer to young people who require support with their emotional health and wellbeing.  The college support would seek to provide alternative and/or additional services to strengthen the Community Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) offer in the east London boroughs through additional activities, information, resilience building and networking opportunities for young people.  This co-produced initiative will work to increase resilience in our communities, provide alternative and additional support at a community level in line with national iThrive ambitions (for more information, see: http://implementingthrive.org/about-us/i-thrive-implementing-thrive/#0) bolstering early help for young people.  This offer is envisaged to reduce the need for more complex and intensive support and to sit alongside existing support to improve the quality of services for young people.  It is also envisaged to support young people while they wait for support from other services such as CAMHS.

The model builds on the success of the Discovery College in Bedfordshire and Luton, established in January 2022 to provide support to young people with mental health challenges and to promote mental health and wellbeing. ELFT CAMHS proposes to extend the offer to young people in east London boroughs via a subcontracting arrangement through the voluntary, community and social enterprise (VCSE) sector.