New Children’s Support Project

 Sight Support Hull & East Yorkshire is one of seven community projects across Hull have been awarded £267,000 in grants from The Ideas Fund to work with researchers to develop and try out ideas that address problems related to mental wellbeing in their communities.

The local projects aim to improve mental wellbeing across a broad range of communities – from children with visual impairments, families living with the impact of acquired brain injuries and those with lived experiences of addiction.

The Ideas Fund is a grants scheme, run by the British Science Association and funded by Wellcome, that brings together people who have an idea about how to improve the mental wellbeing of their local community with researchers who can help turn their idea into a reality.

Since its launch in 2021, The Ideas Fund has awarded £3.28 million in grants to over 70 community projects across four geographical areas of the UK: Hull, the Scottish Highlands and Islands, North West Northern Ireland and Oldham. The Ideas Fund is committed to connecting communities with researchers, as well as diversifying the voices within health research. During the development of the Fund, it became clear that a targeted, place-based approach would be the most efficient way of achieving this goal by working in just four areas to test and learn. The Ideas Fund began working in these four locations in early 2021 and it wants to continue to explore how its approach can grow in these places, building on what has been learned.

The first round of funding in July 2021 saw 12 projects in Hull receive £417,000 in grants. In the second round of funding announced today, a further seven projects in the region have received funding totaling £267,000 to develop and deliver projects that address local mental wellbeing concerns

Sight Support HEY will will use its £53,693 grant from The Ideas Fund to develop a project, in partnership with a researcher from the University of Hull, to improve the mental wellbeing of local children affected by sight loss by enabling them to express their personal stories and experiences through creative activities, including arts, drama, music and nature based activities.

Alison Stannard, Services Manager at Sight Support said: “We are delighted to have been awarded a grant from The Ideas Fund, which will help us expand upon the work we are doing here in Hull. This project will enable us to work closely with local visually impaired children and their family member to improve their mental wellbeing and help identify their specific support needs.”

For more about our new children’s services, please visit our website.

Other grants include:

• P.A.U.L for Brain Recovery: the project focuses on improving the mental wellbeing of families living with acquired brain injury (ABI) in Hull, enabling them to share their stories via creative activities, including storytelling and arts, and holding an exhibition (see case study below).
• ERNI: Emotions Are Not Illness (ERNI) is currently a group of people who meet virtually, of both mental health service users and practitioners, in Hull who are frustrated by the current mental health service systems. They build real-world relationships between service users and co-create
• Youth Aspire Connect: the NORM wellbeing project will co-create toolkits and creative outputs to support young people, parents and community leaders in Hull to destigmatise and normalise conversations about mental health and wellbeing among young people from minoritised
• Self-Advocacy through Storytelling: the VOICE self-advocacy group in Hull supports people with a learning disability by exploring how storytelling helps with connection and increases a sense of community and wellbeing.

• Open Up and Transform: the OUT group is a diverse group of 12 people, some of whom have been in prison, with a collective interest in the prison and criminal justice systems. The project will work with a researcher to exchange lived and learnt knowledge, with the aim to improve the mental wellbeing of people with experience of the criminal justice system.

• OSHI Support for an App Design: OSHI is a peer-led project that connects those with relevant lived experience to those living through experiences of addiction and recovery who need immediate help. This new project will explore the ideas of bringing support onto one digitally accessible

For more information about The Ideas Fund, visit theideasfund.org or follow @TheIdeasFund on Twitter or @TheIdeasFund on Facebook