Community Impact Award

By Admin on October 20, 2015 • ( 0 )

The Free Your Mind Campaign, supported by West Sussex Young People’s Service, has been awarded the Community Impact Award for the most sustainable project. Positive for Youth is an initiative created to empower and unlock potential in our future leaders across the UK. The awards are developed with a focus on recognising outstanding contribution to community, media, arts and performance, encouraging collaboration and sharing of best practice with the industries.

Free Your Mind, a social action project run by young people for young people, aims to challenge stigma, taboo and stereotypes and improve mental health services for their peers.

The young people will showcase their work and collect their award at ceremony on 23 October, at the prestigious Bush Hall, Shepherds Bush, in London.

Here’s the comments from the group on hearing that they have won the award.

Who we are:

Free Your Mind Campaign, helping to spread awareness of mental health;
The Free Your Mind Group is a group of young people campaigning to improve mental health services, provide information and raise awareness.
We are a group who are campaigning on mental health, tackling stigma that surrounds mental health.
We are young people who are passionate about mental health.
We are a group created to give a voice to young people, enabling young people to know where they can go to get help, and raise awareness of mental health.
We are a campaign group that tackle issues that young people have to face because of their mental health problems.

What we are passionate about:

We are passionate about changing stigma around mental health with young people.
We want to raise awareness of the services in West Sussex so young people can access them.
We are passionate about increasing mental health awareness and supporting all those who want and need help.
Making a difference, helping others, making sure people do not think they are alone.
The group is passionate about working with young people to empower them and raise their profile within society.
We are passionate about defeating the stigma on mental health.
Were passionate about raising awareness for young people around information, support and general awareness.
Helping the community and making a difference with this project.

What it means to win a Positive for Youth Award:

It means the Free Your Mind group gain good recognition.
Feel very proud and like we have achieved a lot.
Allows us to feel like our mental health work is finally acknowledged for the hard work we have done.
It means a great amount for this group to win this award, because everyone has put in so much effort and time, we have all been so dedicated to this group as it means a lot to the majority of us.
It shows what we can do and it feels great that we can be recognised for what we do.

Free Your Mind are in the process on planning their next Convention which will focus on

Convention overarching themes:

Awareness – meeting other young people / reduce stigma.
Information – access info who to talk too / where to go to get information.
Support – from organisations / in schools /friends.
Reduce Discrimination – through raising awareness.

Aim of Convention:

To create greater awareness of mental health issues with young people in West Sussex, and empower them to be able to reach out and speak out when they need help.

Objectives:

To provide information for friends to help other friends with mental health issues
To provide young people the opportunity to speak out who are currently accessing services.
Find out about services that are currently available.
How to better target young people with information about mental health.
Increase young people’s awareness of how being discriminated against impact on them.