This corner piece highlights the importance of involving people with lived experience of mental health problems in co-production. By doing this, your organisation can truly hear and understand your people's needs, and be able to design and deliver activities to meet them.
“The development and promotion of opportunities in order that a diverse range of people, with lived experience of a mental health problem, influence and participate in our work.” (Mind's definition of lived experience involvement)
Ways in which you can do this include:
Inviting people with lived experience to be a part of a Wellbeing Action Group.
Asking for input from people with lived experience in your tracking process.
Involving people with lived experience from diverse communities to be truly inclusive.
Obtaining input from people with lived experience when integrating mental health into your policies and processes - see “Integrate mental health”.
Refer to our guide on Involving people with lived experience of mental health problems in the design and delivery of your work for more information.
There are many ways you can involve people with lived experience in your work. The method you choose will depend on time, level of involvement, support and budget.
You can use a variety of methods to enable people to influence and participate in your work:
Remote influence and participation
Discussion and focus groups
Interviews
Questionnaires and surveys
Working and steering groups
When we continue to use the same language and terminology, we reach the same audience. This can lead to excluding communities that don’t engage with your usual style of communication.
Talk to people and ask them how they would like to engage them in your work.
Include people from different communities and backgrounds to co-design your key messaging.
Invite people across the organisation to share their mental health experience. See “Champion mental health”.
Ask a patron and/or athlete/ player/participant with lived experience to share their story.
Examples of films and blogs:
The Professional Players Federation (PPF) videos.
The Rugby Players’ Association “Lift the Weight” film.
Andy Baddeley, two-time Olympian and Britain’s 1,500m runner blog.
We ask people with lived experience across our organisation for feedback on our current policies and procedures.
We ask for input from people with lived experience when developing or updating polices and processes that include mental health.
We involve people from different communities and backgrounds within our organisation to enable our work to be truly inclusive.
We involve people from different communities and backgrounds to co-design our mental health messaging and awareness campaigns.
We invite people across our organisation to share their mental health experience.
We invite athletes/players/participants with lived experience of mental health to share their story across our organisation.
Make a commitment
Track your journey
Involve people meaningfully
Integrate mental health
Be person- centred
Connect & collaborate
Improve knowledge & confidence
Champion mental health
Spot, support & signpost
