2 April 2026
Young people across the UK are facing a mental health crisis. Waiting lists for clinical services are long. Statutory systems are stretched. This results in too many young people experiencing harm in the gap between needing help and getting it.
But we also know what young people themselves say they need and it isn’t always more clinical provision. Young people want timely, non-judgmental support from people they trust, in spaces that are connected to their real lives. When describing their local youth space, one young person said “it’s like a really nice chill area for young people… to just go there and socialise, relax, play games, do what you really want.” While this might not sound like mental health provision, our work and learning on Thriving Minds has demonstrated how critical youth services like these are for supporting young people’s mental health and wellbeing.
What did Thriving Minds teach us?
Thriving Minds was an £11 million fund, supporting 99 youth organisations across the UK, and made possible by the Julia Rausing Trust and the Westminster Foundation. Thriving Minds has shown us what happens when youth organisations are awarded multi-year, unrestricted funding and have the capacity and flexibility to work in genuine partnership with others.
Last month, we published our latest policy report: Another way is possible: Building hope, belonging and better mental health through youth work. Here, we explore the vital role of youth work partnerships in delivering on our six recommendations to Government and funders. These are:
These recommendations link to live conversations focusing on how to best structure systems to support positive outcomes for young people. These include:
The partnerships that were developed by Thriving Minds grantees offer powerful and practical examples of how to design a different kind of system.
Sharing resources: closing the gap together
One Thriving Minds grantee, working primarily with young people outside mainstream education and employment, developed a partnership with a local mental health charity to combine their expertise to create an “11-60+ service”. This partnership provided a continuity of support across the life course that neither organisation could have offered alone. It closed a structural gap at exactly the point where young people transitioning into adult provision most often fall through.
They also used the funding to develop a summer transition programme for young people who risked losing ground over the six-week summer holiday – a critical transition period the grantee described as one that can “almost undo all the good work we’ve done with them all year.” This partnership came to exist because they had the time, trust and flexibility to identify a need and respond. That is what good funding makes possible and it speaks directly to Recommendation 3 from our report, calling for a long-term, cross-government funding settlement that treats youth work as core preventative mental health infrastructure, not a discretionary add-on funded through short-term project grants.
Supporting delivery: going where young people and their families are
A second organisation’s work primarily focused on sport and physical activity, but has evolved through a range of partnerships to offer comprehensive mental health, family and community support. Their partnerships span local authorities, schools, community safety teams, the police, NHS trusts and food banks. What unites this work is a willingness to go to the spaces where young people and their families are and to coordinate support across systems, rather than deliver in isolation. The resulting “blended approach” sees services for parents run parallel to youth programmes, recognising that young people’s wellbeing cannot be separated from the pressures their families face.
When the local NHS trust recognised the value of this work and approached the grantee to expand their mental health provision, it was the result of years of consistent, relationship-based presence in the community. But the grantee was also clear about the pressures that came with it:“we’re very aware of the power that all these big organisations have [with] regards [to] funding, and then you’ve got government policy that leads that, and we’re just in the middle of that now.”
The youth sector’s value to the local community came to be widely acknowledged – but it needs further support to embed change at a local level. Recommendation 6 in our report calls for youth workers to be explicitly embedded within NHS workforce planning and neighbourhood health models as core preventative partners, with the training, supervision and referral pathways that role demands. Youth organisations are often already doing the work, so they should be consistently treated as integral to the mental health system, not just as a voluntary ‘add-on’ to it.
Sharing learning: building systems to prevent young people falling through gaps
A third organisation who focuses on prevention and early intervention work in schools was grappling with an all too familiar problem – young people who needed mental health support but didn’t meet the threshold for CAMHS. Rather than accept this gap, they worked with local primary care networks and schools to establish a wellbeing panel. This was a collaborative triage structure that brought together children’s services, local agencies and the voluntary sector together around two shared questions: what does this young person need, and who is best placed to help? As the grantee put it, “they weren’t meeting criteria for CAMHS, but they still needed support, so we came together to form this panel.”
The panel changed how the local system operated, shifting away from organisations waiting for referrals towards shared decision-making and collective responsibility. It also led to a wider piece of work called the Community Action Network of around 60 organisations that has continued to meet and collaborate long after the pandemic that first brought them together.
This links closely with Recommendation 2 in our report, calling for aligning school, community and health provision around shared wellbeing outcomes, with clear referral pathways and a sustained focus on early intervention. However, the participating youth leader was also candid about what makes this harder than it should be, in that “funding tends to encourage us to be in competition with each other rather than collaborate.” Therefore, shifting this funding dynamic away from competition towards collaboration is central to more long-term and consistent services for young people.
Increasing reach: how partnerships can change organisations
Another important impact of partnership working is what it does to an organisation internally. One Thriving Minds grantee helped build a consortium of around 70 community and voluntary organisations in their local area which evolved into the Connected Care Network. This network convened voluntary organisations, a pediatric doctor and the local council to provide early intervention for young people facing long waiting times for mental health services.
Faced with growing demand through the Network, the grantee made a deliberate strategic decision to stop running standalone mentoring programmes and redirect that capacity entirely into the Connected Care model. As they put it, “before, we were quite grabby… now, we tend to try and do everything in partnership.”
In this way, the evolution of this partnership didn’t just expand their reach, it also changed how they operated. One young person who joined for mentoring support moved from one hour of contact a week to four hours a day of open-access provision within months. They didn’t return as a requirement of a programme, rather due to the relationships they had built there.
Investing in partnerships can drive organisational change, not just service delivery. This speaks directly to Recommendation 4 in our report, which calls for Young Futures Hubs to be designed around existing youth work ecosystems rather than on top of them. The integrated model this grantee built took years of community relationship and trust building to develop. It would be a mistake to assume that quick, top-down structures can replicate it.
The underlying conditions that make partnerships work
Across all four case studies, the same enablers recur:
These enablers require time, and time requires funding.
Thriving Minds and these partnerships developed, at least in part because the programme offered multi-year, unrestricted grants that gave organisations the stability to think strategically, invest in relationships, and take the risks that genuine collaboration often requires.
As one grantee put it, the funding meant they could stop “chasing the pound coin around salaries or overheads” and focus on the work that actually matters. This is what good grant-making looks like and what our report calls on government to embed into the architecture of how youth work is funded as a long-term structural commitment, not a series of one-off short-term programmes.
What needs to change
The evidence from Thriving Minds demonstrates that youth work is critical social infrastructure. Youth work is essential to a transformative mental health and wellbeing offer that reaches young people earlier, works for those least likely to access statutory services and is fit for the future.
Our report sets out six recommendations for how government and funders can build on what these organisations have proven is possible:
The grantees whose work is shared here are not waiting for the system to change, they are actively doing this work already. They built partnerships, navigated power imbalances, secured joint funding and supported thousands of young people – proving in practice that another way is possible.
Last year, UK Youth and our learning partner, Dartington Service Design Lab, reflected on this same topic and these stories of partnership building from the Thriving Minds cohort.