Deadline: 7-Jul-25
The Pilgrim Trust is inviting applications for its Young Women in Mind programme to help improve the mental health of young women aged 16-25 in the UK.
Their Young Women in Mind programme is about finding effective ways to help young women whose mental health needs would otherwise go overlooked. They intend to build on existing evidence of the value of age and gender appropriate mental health provision by supporting charities that directly engage with young women and who offer sustained and fully integrated programmes of support.
They also aim to encourage greater collaboration across service providers through facilitating grant recipients to come together as cohorts to share best practice, build a supportive peer-network as well as supporting advocacy to bring about policy changes.
Pillars
- They believe that the following four pillars are key to the provision of high-quality mental health support for young women:
- Gendered approach: Mental health services should be mindful of the context of young women’s lives and the unique challenges they experience that can impact on their mental health.
- Gendered approach: Mental health services should be mindful of the context of young women’s lives and the unique challenges they experience that can impact on their mental health.
- Integrated: Poor mental health is often part of a wider web of support needs. Mental health services should be integrated with other support options and adopt a whole person approach to identify and meet the full range of an individual’s needs (e.g. housing or domestic abuse); this can be in-house or through partnership arrangements.
- Substantive Equality: Mental health services should recognise and respond to the social and structural inequalities in the UK. Young women should not have to work harder and overcome more barriers to access the help they need.
Funding Information
- They receive far more applications than they can support. In this programme, they fund fewer organisations, providing larger grants. Organisations can request between £60k to £100k, spread over three years.
Eligible Projects
- They want to support organisations delivering high quality services specifically designed to respond to the needs of young women experiencing mental health difficulties.
- They particularly welcome applications from organisations leading the way in good practice or innovation relating to age and gender informed approaches to mental health provision.
- They will prioritise those that work collaboratively with partners to extend their impact and share expertise, and that champion fair and equal access to mental health services.
- This funding is focused on the needs of young women aged 16-25 years old. However, they recognise that some charities may have services that span a slightly wider age band. Therefore, they will also consider funding projects where at least 80% of the participants of the work fall within the 16-25 age band.
- They will fund mental health services that support young women with existing and increasingly entrenched mental health problems. Their mental health needs may not have been formally diagnosed but will have a clear impact on their ability to cope.Examples of what they will fund:
- Young women who are falling between the gaps in statutory child and adult mental health services.
- Young women who face structural barriers to accessing mental health provision (e.g. gender, language, or cultural needs).
- Young women who have presented at other services (housing, domestic abuseetc.) and have been identified as having mental health needs.
Ineligible Projects
- The programme is not for:
- Prevention work
- Generalised wellbeing initiatives
- Acute care services
- Work offering mainly one-off advice or signposting to other services
- Generic mental health youth services where the service has not been designed to be gender or age specific.
Eligibility Criteria
- To be eligible to apply to the Young Women in Mind programme your organisation must fulfil the following:
- Be a UK-registered charity
- Been in operation for at least three years
- Have an annual income of between £100,000 and £1 million
- Work or project is located in:
- North East England – County Durham, Tyne and Wear, Northumberland and the Tees Valley
- Yorkshire and The Humber – North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, the East Riding of Yorkshire and North and North East Lincolnshire
Ineligibility Criteria
- They will not fund:
- Individuals
- Non-UK registered charities or charities registered in the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man
- Not-for-profit organisations that are not registered charities including CICs and Social Enterprises
- Any retrospective costs
- Building work or capital costs associated with buildings
- Work which is a statutory responsibility
- Activities promoting religious beliefs
- One-off activities and events
- Projects taking place outside of the UK, including overseas travel
For more information, visit Pilgrim Trust.
