News
Funding Awarded for Younger Persons Project
30/03/2026
Fantastic funding update – Stepping stones has secured funding from this years Community Mental Health & Wellbeing Fund. These monies are for a Younger Persons Project and will help us to reach and support more people aged 16 -24yrs old.
Stepping Stones are so grateful to have received this award, it will allow us to address one of our main challenges – how we engage our younger members! The funds are being put towards a new YP project that will raise awareness of our services within the younger community and the local educational system. Ultimately supporting more younger people.
In the last year, we saw that only 47% of younger referrals (aged 16-24yrs) actually engaged with us and continued to access our services. More than 70 young people did not follow up support for their identified mental health issues, and we believe that we need to do more to address that.
We plan to overcome this by launching this project, increasing our engagement, and our understanding of our younger community. We will proactively gather intel from other local YP service providers and networks, we will circulate a questionnaire to our younger members, increase our outreach and engagement with schools and communities. Then use the gathered information with user led insights to provide a person centred approach to our individual and group services for younger people.
This funding is providing a dedicated project worker 1 day a week, and we’ve allocated this project to ‘Sian’ who is one of our existing trained and experienced mental health support workers. Sian is also a member of the Neurodiversity projects and keen to work with younger people.
The group activities would provide peer support, information, education sessions, social activities, and the opportunity to form friendships and support systems. The activities selected would be by member requests and feedback; they would also include opportunities for psychoeducation on subjects such as anxiety, stress, sleep patterns, cyber safety, bullying, healthy eating, self-harm, suicide prevention, bereavement, financial support, education and employability, neurodiversity and signposting to other services.
Sian will be taking on a younger member caseload throughout the project; delivering individual support sessions for for 6-8 week blocks and then leading on running future support groups for our young members.
Thank you again to WDCVS and the CMHWB Fund! We really are delighted to have secured the funding, and we are looking forwards to seeing what Sian and our younger members can achieve for our community mental health.
Hear what Sian had to say about the project:
“Hello, My name is Sian, and I joined Stepping Stones in December 2024 as a Mental Health Support Worker on the Neurodiversity Team. A year and a half later, I’m really excited that I’m able to lead on our new YP project. Stepping Stones do a lot of amazing work and it’s important to me that young people feel included and supported in everything we do. Being young often means facing many unknowns for the first time, which can feel really overwhelming sometimes. I hope this project helps make that journey a little easier for our members to navigate. Over the coming months, my focus is to listen directly to our young people on the challenges they’re facing and the support they need most, so that we can shape this project around their experiences and voices.”
