Community: during, and beyond Mental Health Awareness Week 2025
Last week was Mental Health Awareness Week, organised by the Mental Health Foundation, with the theme of ‘community’. Community is more than locality or geography, it’s the networks of people who surround a child or young person: family, friends, teachers, mentors, neighbours, and peers.
Building strong communities is an important commitment all year round, but #mentalhealthawarenessweek has been a great opportunity to demonstrate the importance of this for mental wellbeing and to share useful information and resources.
Anna Freud provided these free resources for primary and secondary schools to be used during Mental Health Awareness week. These can also be incorporated into lesson plans throughout the school year.
Research communicated by Professor Neil Humphrey during the #BeeWell School Belonging event earlier this month highlighted that "school belonging makes a difference to later wellbeing"; "young people with higher levels of school belonging are significantly less likely to follow suboptimal attendance trajectories", and that "relationships with staff" are amongst elements that are particularly influential. It’s also especially important to recognise that different groups of individuals belong differently (such as students with SEN, girls, students for minoritised groups etc), so schools should consider how the whole community is factored in.
This quote by Trabian Shorters was shared by Roisin McEvoy, Head of Schools Training and National Programmes at Anna Freud providing a positive outlook on this:
“How do we create equitable outcomes for all members of our community? We can start by defining people by their aspirations, not their challenges.”
Trabian Shorters is founder and CEO of BMe Community.
Professor Eamon McCrory, CEO of Anna Freud, also reflected on how this year's theme resonates with Anna Freud’s work in this blog. He highlights why community is important, and spotlights work at the intersection of research, policy, and clinical support, bridging knowledge and action across the communities we serve to build stronger, more connected systems of support for children and young people.
At CORC, we work with many organisations who provide services in their local area to benefit the mental wellbeing within their community. This includes our team regularly supporting services to establish theories of change and to measure and monitor impact of the work they are doing – and to improve and develop based on that feedback and evidence. For further information on this, see here or please get in touch.
Within all of our work, we have seen the strength of community: parents and carers forming support circles, schools working together with our practitioners, and young people stepping up to look after one another. Long may this continue.
Chrissy Norwich, Communications and Marketing Officer