Find out more & join the Healthy Minds Forum

See current engagement opportunities here

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Valuing shared ownership & lived experience

Harnessing the knowledge and skills of people with 'lived experience' is of huge importance to Healthy Minds.

We began in 2007 as a small group of people with experience of accessing mental health services who saw and felt the 'gaps' in services where people's needs were not being met. Healthy Minds grew from a sense of need for community, creativity and peer-support for people experiencing mental health challenges.

From the start, our organisation was led by the people who used it. This small group worked together to continually identify what people needed, and how Healthy Minds could support these needs with little resource, relying on small grant funding and gradually building a group of committed volunteers and staff. Today, we have grown to be the leading mental health charity in Calderdale, underpinned by our mission to be here for anyone who needs us.

​Although securing funding for our work can be challenging, we hold huge strength in the wealth of knowledge, experiences, skills and passion of the people in our Healthy Minds community - the people who use our services, become volunteers, our experienced staff, committed trustees and supportive partner organisations.

We want to make sure that we all have shared ownership of Healthy Minds, that we all have equal voice in our future as an organisation, and that we remain actively committed to our value of 'lived experience'.

Our next steps

To remain committed to ensuring a sense of shared ownership of our organisation, this year we are:

• Developing a membership offer so that people in our community can become an official member of our organisation, exercise voting rights and come together with other members to influence our future collectively.
• Re-launching the Healthy Minds Forum - a space for members and friends of Healthy Minds to meet and discuss issues that matter to you in mental health, looking at what we can do to improve the wellbeing of our communities together.​

How you can be involved...

Co-design our membership offer
You can help shape what our new membership offer will look like, what benefits it could bring to our Healthy Minds community and how we can best get people on board.

Join the Healthy Minds Forum
You can join our Healthy Minds Forum group, and become part of a collective working together to improve mental health services. Got a topic you'd like to bring to the Forum? Share it with us!

 

The Healthy Minds Forum

The Healthy Minds Forum is a shared space to discuss issues that matter to you in mental health, to listen, collaborate, and look at what we can do to improve the wellbeing of our communities together.​

The Forum began in late 2012, as a new incarnation of the MPower service user group that had previously run for several years. Due to capacity issues and the impacts of the Covid pandemic, we have not been able to run the Forum since 2020.

​We re-launched the Forum on 21 February 2023, when we invited our community to join us to co-design our organisation's new membership offer and discuss what topics Forum members would like to explore in future meetings.

Visit the Forum hub!

 ​Thinking of joining? Here are some things to know:

• The Forum is a space to discuss topics, concerns or experiences that matter to you and your local communities.
• Anyone with an interest in working collectively to explore and tackle issues in mental health is welcome to join us.
• The Forum has an emphasis on valuing lived experience as a powerful form of knowledge.
• The Forum is not a peer-support group.
• People who join the Forum will have a say in how it is organised - we will continue to discuss the best way to run the Forum so that it works for everyone.
• At each meeting we will re-establish our group expectations of each other, sharing values of: Respect, Honesty, Empowerment, Lived Experience and Shared Ownership.
• The Forum will meet regularly throughout the year, Usually once every 1-2 months.

Find upcoming Forum events here

Visit the Forum padlet to see latest meeting notes

Join the Forum and book onto upcoming events here!

Watch our Chief Officer Jonny Richardson-Glenn's recent Forum presentation: ​The Voluntary & Community Sector in Calderdale and beyond: a changing landscape.

​This presentation was written and delivered at Forum events in May - June 2023 in response to Forum members' interest in understanding more about what the current context of funding and healthcare structures mean for Healthy Minds.