Community Mental Health Learning Programme
Overview — Community Mental Health Learning Programme
What is the Learning Programme?
The Community Mental Health Learning Programme is Mind in Camden and Likewise’s learning function for the community mental health system. Rather than delivering frontline services itself, the Programme tests new ways of working, evaluates what happens, and feeds that insight back to strengthen services across the borough.
It has run in two phases:
Phase 1 (2023-25)
Two members of VCS staff were embedded within Camden’s NHS Community Mental Health Core Teams, working alongside clinical colleagues to support the shift towards more personalised, holistic approaches to care — promoting greater integration between services and closer alignment with local neighbourhoods.
Phase 2 (2025-26)
The Programme extended into the East Integrated Neighbourhood Team, connecting health, council and voluntary and community sector (VCS) partners around shared neighbourhood priorities.
Our approach and values
We use service design methods, ongoing evaluation and learning, and a dedicated service user Reference Group to bring lived experience into the design and consultation of services across the wider system.
Our stance is a deliberate one: we champion the VCS as a leader in the local area, not just a delivery partner, and we bring a relational, person-centred, critical approach to systems — rather than a purely clinical or procedural one.
What we’ve achieved so far
Since 2023, our work has included:
Evaluation of Camden Core Teams
A bottom-up evaluation of how the Community Mental Health Framework has been implemented, combining staff and service user interviews with performance data.
Co-production Reference Group
A service user group, running since 2024, that has shaped service redesign, contributed to Public Health Needs Assessments, and offered consultation to NHS and local partners.
VCS Neighbourhood Agenda
A shared vision, developed with local authority and VCS partners across four workshops, for how the voluntary sector aligns with Camden’s neighbourhood model.
Group Support Survey
Research into the barriers and preferences shaping residents’ engagement with group-based mental health support.
A Simple Guide to Navigating the Mental Health System
Frontline-designed training that has improved staff understanding of referral routes across Camden, delivered to around 180 people live and viewed 90+ times online.
Launch Pads: Supportive Discharge
Pilot support groups helping people bridge the gap between clinical discharge and independent community life, run with 39 members across five neighbourhoods.
Welcome In, Kentish Town
A series of community events tackling loneliness by connecting residents with local voluntary sector offers, reaching over 255 people across three events.
Community Connections Booklet
A printed guide to 17 local organisations and services, distributed at events and through GP practices to help residents find support.
What we’re working on now
We’ve been recommissioned to continue this work until April 2027. We’re currently finalising our neighbourhood work, and will share updates soon on what comes next.
Who funds us
The Learning Programme is funded by Camden Council.
Who we are
The Learning Programme has been delivered by James Brown (2023-2026), Toni Wilkey (2025-2026) and Mohammed Dali-Chaouch (2023-2025).
Get in touch
For questions about the Learning Programme, our Reference Group, or how to to work with us, contact Jon Higgs jhiggs@mindincamden.org.uk (Mind in Camden) or Toni Wilkey toni.wilkey@likewise.org.uk (Likewise).
Our Work in the Camden Core Teams
For 18 months from October 2023, Mind in Camden and Likewise embedded two members of staff directly within Camden’s NHS Mental Health Core Teams. The aim was to support a shift towards more community-oriented, holistic, accessible and flexible mental health support, in line with NHS England’s Community Mental Health Framework — and to build a sustainable model of learning and co-production across a genuinely multi-agency system.
Service Evaluation of Camden Core Teams
Our largest piece of work in this phase was a full evaluation of how the Community Mental Health Framework had been implemented in Camden.
We took a bottom-up approach: interviewing frontline staff and service users, and analysing activity and performance data, to build an honest picture of progress.
What it found:
- Gave voice to issues affecting both service users and staff that hadn’t previously been captured
- Shaped the redesign of community mental health services in Camden, including referral and discharge processes
- Delivered recommendations for trauma-informed improvements to clinical environments
- Surfaced insight into the cultural challenges of inter-agency collaboration and neighbourhood approaches to wellbeing
We produced two versions of the final report:
- One focused on the Core Teams for NHS decision-makers, and;
- A second aimed at anyone with an interest in the wider mental health system in Camden.
Why it mattered
the evaluation demonstrated that the voluntary sector can and should contribute to learning, evaluation and service design — not only service delivery. Its findings went on to directly shape every project that followed, from co-designed discharge support to our neighbourhood-level work.
Co-design with staff and service users
Alongside the evaluation, we ran two co-design processes bringing together NHS and VCS staff with service users:
- Winter Crisis Prevention — a rapidly developed proposal for a voluntary sector-based prevention offer, aimed at reducing crisis admissions by offering holistic community support over the winter months.
- Landing Space — a co-designed, person-centred discharge process integrating clinical and voluntary services, intended to prevent relapse and make better use of community resources. This work laid the groundwork for our later Launch Pads pilots.
Building a Reference Group
Central to this work has been our service user Reference Group — an accessible, meaningful space for people to share experience and help redesign Camden’s mental health system. Set up in 2024 and still running, it has offered lived-experience insight into research on clinical psychology letters, the design of a person-centred triage process in the Kentish Town Core Team, proposals to transform community mental health services, and the local authority’s Mental Health Needs Assessment.
What’s next
As of 2025, this strand of work has evolved into collaboration within the East Integrated Neighbourhood Team, developing a blueprint for how a wider group of partners — including health and council services — can work together to address mental health need across Camden. You can read our full findings in our evaluation of the Community Mental Health Framework in Camden.
Our Work in Integrated Neighbourhood Approaches
Over the past year, our work has been defining the role voluntary sector mental health providers should play in neighbourhood-based working — how the VCS contributes alongside health and council partners to a shared, local approach to wellbeing.
Reach Out Camden has been a key partner throughout, helping ground this thinking in the realities of frontline delivery.
Alongside this strategic work, we’ve tested what it means in practice — building consensus, developing insight, piloting new models, and building the infrastructure for closer collaboration. Here’s a summary of that work, followed by a closer look at two of the pilots.
Building consensus — VCS Neighbourhood Agenda
Working with the local authority and wider north London VCS partners across four workshops, we developed a shared vision for how voluntary sector mental health providers align with Camden’s neighbourhood model.
Developing insight — Group Support Survey
We surveyed 32 Reach Out Camden clients to understand the barriers to engaging with group-based support, finding anxiety and low confidence outweighed practical concerns like timing or cost. Our Simple Guide to Navigating the Mental Health System has offered similar insight from a staff perspective, surfacing gaps in professionals’ knowledge of referral routes across the system.
Piloting new ways of working — Launch Pads: Supportive Discharge
We ran co-designed peer support groups to help people bridge the gap between clinical discharge and independent community life, with five pilots reaching 39 members across Kentish Town, Swiss Cottage and Euston. Welcome In, Kentish Town has been another pilot in this space, testing how community events can connect residents with local offers to tackle loneliness.
We ran co-designed peer support groups to help people bridge the gap between clinical discharge and independent community life, with five pilots reaching 39 members across Kentish Town, Swiss Cottage and Euston. Welcome In, Kentish Town has been another pilot in this space, testing how community events can connect residents with local offers to tackle loneliness.
Read more in depth about two specific projects below.
Building infrastructure for collaboration — A Simple Guide to Navigating the Mental Health System
One of the clearest roles the VCS can play is building shared infrastructure that helps other services collaborate.
Our Core Teams evaluation had identified a recurring problem: professionals across health, council and voluntary sector roles often didn’t know how or where to refer residents for mental health support. This “referral bouncing” meant people were assessed repeatedly without getting help — risking re-traumatisation, disengagement, and delays to preventative care.
Developed by the VCS to support the East Neighbourhood, we co-designed a short, practical training session — 15 to 20 minutes — built around a single clear map of how people enter mental health support in Camden and how services connect to one another. It’s grounded in real-world experience rather than policy documents, and includes guidance on who to contact when a referral route isn’t obvious. Since then, it’s been rolled out across the whole of Camden.
The impact so far:
- 92% of staff reported improved understanding of the mental health system
- 96% learned about new referral routes or services
- 59% said they were more likely to refer into mental health services earlier
Around 180 people have attended live sessions, with the recorded version viewed more than 90 times in its first two weeks alone — shared informally across staff networks with no formal promotion. Feedback has consistently been strong, with staff describing a previously “confusing and opaque” system made suddenly navigable.
We’re now building the case to scale this: running it twice yearly with an annual content review, adapting delivery to borough or neighbourhood level, training a small pool of facilitators, and exploring an equivalent version for young people’s services.
Piloting collaboration and integration — Welcome In, Kentish Town
Another pilot within the East Neighbourhood focused squarely on collaboration and integration across stakeholders. Loneliness emerged as a shared priority for the East Integrated Neighbourhood Team and the local community network, Kentish Town Connects. In response, we helped form the Loneliness Action Group — a collaboration between the Learning Programme, Camden Council’s Participation Team, and the East Integrated Neighbourhood Team — to design a practical response.
The result was Welcome In, Kentish Town: a community day reimagined as a health fair without the stalls. Instead, it offered hands-on activities — quilt-making, weaving, yoga, digital inclusion support, massage and more — run by local providers, alongside wellbeing sessions from the Zen Bus. The idea was to move people along a simple pathway: attendance, then awareness, then engagement with a local offer.
Held three times, with over 255 attendees in total, the events showed:
- 70% of attendees left interested in trying a local offer
- 50% named a specific local offer they intended to follow up on — evidence the model moves people from awareness into action
- Strong, consistent feedback about the warmth of the welcome and the pull of hands-on, creative activities
Twelve local organisations took part, including Mind in Camden, Likewise, Castlehaven, Creative Health Camden, CNWL and NLFT NHS Trusts, and Camden Council. Alongside the events, we produced a Community Connections Booklet — profiling 17 local organisations, distributed at events and through GP practices — to help residents navigate local support beyond the day itself.
What made it work was the alignment of three things at once: a free venue through the council’s experimental Civic Action Lab, the convening capacity of the Participation Team, and the Learning Programme’s ability to plan and deliver the intervention itself.
We think this model could scale across each of Camden’s five neighbourhoods, with the right combination of accessible venues, sustained annual funding, and a clear local lead to coordinate delivery.
