Nominet launches online mental health funding programme: #RESET

14th November 2019


14 November 2019, Oxford: Nominet, the profit with a purpose company operating at the heart of the internet infrastructure, today launches the Nominet #RESET Mental Health Programme. #RESET aims to increase the reach and impact of mental health services for young people. It is part of Nominet’s public benefit activity to improve 1 million lives, and will provide grants totaling over £500,000 across some of the UK’s leading mental health and youth charities to provide support for over half a million young people a year.

The organisations receiving Nominet #RESET funding include The Mix, Chasing the Stigma, YoungMinds, stem4, Nightline Association, Barnardo’s and The Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. They will deliver a range of activities, including improving signposting online, developing new digital products, digitally transforming their organisation to meet demand, and creating best-practice guidance for those developing digital mental health products for young people.

The programme follows Nominet research into Charities, Young People and Digital Mental Health services, an extensive sector mapping activity, and an expert panel event.  This discovery process identified some key challenges: the growing pressure on mental health services, the increasingly digital channels through which young people seek support and information, and the current minimal overlap of trusted organisations delivering digital products and services for young people. As a result, Nominet has decided to focus its support in a number of key areas: directly supporting national charities to deliver digital mental health services, supporting quality improvements across services they offer, as well as improved signposting for young people.

Eleanor Bradley, MD of Registry Solutions and Public Benefit at Nominet says: “Demand for mental health services has risen dramatically in the last five years, and at the same time the channels young people use to seek support have migrated to digital. Our research showed that many expert charities offering targeted support for specific needs when young people are most vulnerable or in crisis are at risk of falling behind digitally or need help to amplify what they offer, and we want to support these organisations to be at the forefront of digital mental health service provision.

“As part of our commitment to public benefit, with a focus on driving initiatives that promote greater connectivity, inclusivity and security online, we believe our new funding programme #RESET will provide some much needed help – in essence, the resource to reset the mental health support system – where it is sorely required.”

Chris Martin, CEO at The Mix says: “We’ve seen a shocking rise in the number of young people contacting us around their mental health, so we are excited to be working with the Nominet #RESET mental health programme to scale The Mix’s impact on mental wellbeing. With their help, we will develop our triage tool to create more active referral points in the digital spaces where young people gather, deepen the use of our peer community and improve signposting from our online and helpline services to create better ongoing support journeys.”

Vanessa Longley, Director of Development at YoungMinds said: “We’re delighted to be supported by Nominet’s #RESET Mental Health Programme. The funding will help many more thousands of young people to find their way. Helping them access practical actionable information online when they need it, so we can reduce the number of young people reaching crisis point.”

Joe Martin, Trustee, Nightline Association comments: “We’re incredibly excited to be working with Nominet as part of the #RESET programme and genuinely believe the partnership will unlock better reach and quality of service for students across the U.K. who simply need a safe place to talk about how they’re feeling.”

Eleanor Bradley concludes: “Working with these organisations we’re focused on our #RESET funding positively impacting as many young people as possible – reaching over 600,000 by December 2020 and up to 3 million over the next three years – with online mental health services that really make a difference.”

The Nominet #RESET Mental Health Programme is providing funding based on an in-depth consultation with each of the national partners.  Each partner will invest in the development and delivery of their activities over an 18-month period from December 2019. Nominet and its partners will share an impact and learning report each year to help others exploring the role of digital in this field.


Notes for Editors

Nominet Press Office, Brands2Life, +44 (0)20 7592 1200, [email protected]

Nominet #RESET funded partners:

Nightline Association

Nightline is a listening, emotional support, information and supplies service, run by students for students in many universities across the UK. Nightlines are open at night, run by trained, caring, fellow student volunteers.

To take their services to the next level, Nightline Association need to go on a journey of digital transformation. Their goal is to invest in building an intelligence dashboard and test new ideas using their growing digital platform. It’s hoped that, through the funding, Nightline Association will be able to support even more students each year collaborate better across their entire network, sharing knowledge and insights with each other and the wider university population.

stem4

stem4 offer a range of clinically supported co-produced apps and online services, targeted both at teenagers and their wider support networks, to help manage mental ill health early and avoid the escalation of symptoms.

stem4 will increase their digital capacity; building their digital team and marketing outreach, as well as better measure the effectiveness of their apps. It is hoped that through these core activities, the stem4 portfolio of evidence-based apps are more sustainable and able to reach even more young people, with support specific to their needs.

The Mix

The Mix is the UK’s largest online support platform for young people. They offer empathy, information and signposting to young people who are seeking support for the first time or who have been unable to access support elsewhere.

The Mix have piloted a Triage Tool which can be embedded on the websites of schools and universities, allowing young people a shortcut to accessing their services. Through broadening the reach of the triage tool, the expert support services from The Mix will be available to far greater numbers of young people on the platforms and on sites they are already accessing, resulting in an improved mental health support journey for young people in a much wider range of settings.

YoungMinds

YoungMinds exists to break down the barriers young people face when trying to get help and to make sure they have the resilience to overcome life’s difficulties. They give young people a stronger voice in their future by turning real life experiences into positive change for their mental health.

YoungMinds will improve how you find and navigate their website and improve the content to help young people find what they need, when they need it, allowing them to take practical, actionable steps to help themselves and their peers. Using their content as a service, YoungMinds expect these improvements to their site to support many more young people and benefit from, their expert online resources.

The Anna Freud Centre

The Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families is a children’s mental health charity with over 60 years’ experience of caring for young minds. Their vision is a world in which children and their families are effectively supported in building on their own strengths to achieve their goals in life.

The Anna Freud Centre’s youth-facing website, ‘On My Mind’, needs to evolve to become the go-to source for the best information and signposting for young people at any stage of their mental health journey, including building an evidence base for what works on and through the site to inform future development.

Chasing the Stigma

Chasing the Stigma is a national mental health charity, with big ambitions to reduce suicide, eradicate stigma and enable everybody to be able to access clear pathways to mental health support wherever they are.

Chasing the Stigma run the Hub of Hope, a digital signposting tool. Its aim is to undertake developments to the tool which will allow it to partner with national public/private organisations and therefore reach many more people seeking mental health support through different channels.

Barnardo’s and Snook

Barnardo’s are one the UK’s largest children’s charities and help hundreds of thousands of children, young people, parents and carers via their 1000+ services across the UK. Snook are one of the most well-known social service design agencies in the UK and the originator behind the pattern design library and consortia.

‘Design Patterns for Digital Mental Health’ is an online library of best practice guides to help organisations develop digital mental health services. Our funding will expand the library and create a dedicated section for the youth sector. Our hope is that this will make developing new services cheaper, better clinically evidenced and easier to implement for the entire sector.

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About Nominet

Nominet is driven by a commitment to use technology to improve connectivity, security and inclusivity online. For over 20 years, Nominet has run the .UK internet infrastructure, developing an expertise in the Domain Name System (DNS) that now underpins sophisticated threat monitoring, detection, prevention, and analytics that is used by governments and enterprises to mitigate cyber threats.  www.nominet.uk.

About Nominet’s Public Benefit programme

Our public benefit programme aims to improve the lives of one million people, providing support and opportunities to tackle some of the most important digital issues facing young people in the UK today.

We believe in a UK that is connected, inclusive and secure. Our public benefit strategy drives this ambition, formalising our social impact with a focus on initiatives that promote greater connectivity, inclusivity and security. We work to create lasting improvements by targeting a range of emerging issues born out of our digital age, such as online safety and digital inclusion. We also address long-standing social challenges in which technology can play a pivotal role.