Mental health services

You can find out more about our approach to funding here.

We want to support mental health services for people experiencing disadvantage and inequality.

Funding is available for mental health services and associated running costs. We will fund psychotherapy, counselling, and talking therapies delivered in community settings.

We particularly welcome applications that support:

• racialised communities including migrants, people seeking asylum and refugees

• Deaf and disabled people including those with long-term mental health conditions

• people experiencing or at risk of homelessness

• people leaving prison or at the end of community sentences

• people identifying as LGBTQ+

• older people

• people aged under 25 who are disadvantaged

• survivors of abuse, exploitation, and hatred

We can only fund services delivered by accredited and qualified practitioners, for example, with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), and United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP).

We also support work that addresses the additional barriers faced by people from marginalised communities and improves their access to mental health services. We want to fund organisations who understand existing mental health services, have an excellent understanding of their community, and existing or emerging relationships with mental health providers. Successful applications will demonstrate a clear pathway to mental health services delivered by qualified and accredited practitioners.

Funding is for non-statutory service provision; cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can be considered as part of a range of services but cannot be the main provision as it is offered through the National Health Service. 

• understand and offer specialist responses to multiple disadvantage

• involve and engage the communities they serve in the shaping of services

To ensure work is properly resourced, applicants are encouraged to request funds for both staffing as well as costs to support:

• training and development
• clinical supervision (where appropriate)
• project delivery overheads
• relevant staff and volunteer management

Wherever possible, we seek to support projects and organisations that involve the communities the project or organisation serves in the shaping of its services and/​or that are majority-staffed or run by those with lived experience of the issues they address.

Funding staff costs

We will not usually pay for staff costs beyond one full-time equivalent staff post. For example, we could pay for one full-time staff member, or two part-time staff, both working 17.5 hours a week. We will only fund staff posts that are paid the London Living Wage or above.