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Protecting great work: Processes and measures that build knowledge and inspire
Client: Scottish Recovery Network works in partnership with the NHS, voluntary sector organisations, and community groups in Scotland to identify different ways of support people experiencing mental health challenges. They do this by championing lived experience, co-production, and peer support.
Requirements: To align their new strategy with work activities being delivered by the team.
Our solution: Shared knowledge and co-developed with the team solutions that worked for them which included: A programme of work, introduction of working rhythms, impact statements every staff member could understand and utilise for decision-making, an innovation tool, personalised coaching, and support.
Co-creating an international vision for Lived Experience and Peer Leadership
Client: The Global Leadership Exchange (GLE) is an international network connecting leaders in mental health, Disability, and substance use sectors. Every two years, GLE hosts the Leadership Exchange, bringing together leaders from around the world to share knowledge and improve outcomes. We partnered with GLE and EUCOMS to design and co-facilitate the Lived Experience and Peer Leadership Match at the 2024 Leadership Exchange in Heiloo, Netherlands.
Requirements: To design and facilitate an intensive two-day international gathering of peer leaders and allies at the Global Leadership Exchange.
Our solution: A participatory, values-led facilitation approach grounded in servant leadership, convening, and network weaving. We created space for reflection, exploration, and co-production, drawing on collective wisdom across diverse cultures and contexts to produce tangible outputs for local and international reference: the Heiloo Declaration on Lived Experience and Peer Leadership, and the thought paper "Shared Power, Shared Recovery: The Promise of Lived-Experience-Peer Leadership."
Understanding the unique experiences of Disabled residents and identifying actions to reduce inequalities
Client: Barnet Council is a local government authority which recognised the need to address the disparities faced by its Disabled residents after survey results showed suboptimal experiences for them when accessing council services.
Requirements: Researching and reporting on the lived experiences of Disabled residents.
Our solution: Ethnography, involving the widest possible group of respondents and collating their responses as possible solutions to the issues they face.
Rooting for success: Supporting a new Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) charity to grow with confidence
Client: The Colour Factor is a brand new, non-profit organisation with lots of ideas and plans to reshape the support and landscape of mental health for racialised communities. A strong focus on bringing equity, diversity and inclusion practices and anti-racism into mental health offers.
With a growing need and demand for support, as well as the growing spotlight on racial equity, decolonisation, and discrimination, the leadership team knew they needed help to plan, prioritise, and create a realistic, but challenging plan that looked beyond their current month-to-month view.
Requirements: Funding, direction setting, outcomes and impact.
Our solution: Grant support, Strategic planning, Evaluation.
Developing peer leadership to influence change across an NHS Trust
Client: NHS Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys (TEWV) is an NHS Foundation Trust providing mental health and learning disability services across a large area of North East England. The Trust was breaking new ground by developing leadership roles for Peer Supporters.
Requirements: To understand how the Trust's peer leadership work was developing, what was working well, what made it special, how it could be better, and what could help other teams across the NHS.
Our solution: Through co-development workshops, bespoke coaching, and close collaboration with peer workers and managers, we mapped out peer leadership competencies and co-developed a peer leadership framework and self-assessment tool. The tool balances peer values with NHS leadership goals and is ready to scale across multiple trusts.
From vision to reality: Co-creating a community-led mental health service for Highland
Client: Centred is a mental health charity in the Scottish Highlands. Over four years, Habitus has partnered with Centred to develop Discovery College, a rural community-led mental health service grounded in peer support and lived experience.
Requirements: To support the development of a new mental health service from conception through to implementation and delivery, co-created with people with lived experience and community.
Our solution: Long-term partnership providing strategy, service design, income generation, peer leadership development, and ongoing mentoring. We helped centre lived experience voices throughout the process, securing funding and supporting the team to build a service that now operates five days a week across Highland.
Embedding lived experience in the evaluation of a crisis support service
Client: Samaritans is the UK and Ireland's leading suicide prevention charity. Habitus partnered with the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations to evaluate Samaritans' Online Chat Service pilot, a web chat service enabling people to connect with trained volunteers in real time. A key focus was understanding how well the service meets the needs of children and young people.
Requirements: To lead the lived experience and peer research elements of the evaluation, ensuring the voices of people with experience of mental health distress and suicidality were central to understanding the service's impact.
Our solution: We recruited, trained, and mentored young peer researchers with lived experience of crisis and suicidality who were involved at every stage of the evaluation: from co-developing research tools and co-facilitating focus groups, through to co-analysing findings and presenting results back to the client. We worked alongside Samaritans to ensure the evaluation outputs met their needs and strengthened their capacity to work with lived experience in future projects.
Peer research into the effects of Cannabis on mental health
Client: MHCC is a national, and Canada’s largest, mental health charity focused on providing accessible training programs that support mental health in communities and workplaces and lead research and program initiatives that emphasise people-centred values like lived and living experience.
Requirements: To carry out a community-based research project that examined the relationship between the use of Cannabis and its impact on mental health in areas identified as a gap in previous research and current understanding.
Our solution: A peer-led participatory action research project to uncover deep insights into the effects of cannabis on mental health for marginalised groups and capacity-building for the communities they reside in.
Impact evaluation: Uncovering the charity’s impact of the previous 5 years
Client: The Magpie Project is a small charity in East London supporting mothers and children in temporary or insecure housing and who have no recourse to public funds (NRPF).
Requirements: To uncover and evaluate the impact the charity had achieved over the past 5 years, as well as support with developing simple but effective outcome measurement tools to track their impact going forward.
Our solution: A co-developed impact evaluation with accessible visual reporting that service users, funders, and the wider community could understand.
Co-developing peer support training for former jurors in Canada
Client: The Canadian Juries Commission is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to representing Canadians on jury duty and coroner's inquests, improving jury duty, and providing support to Canadians stemming from their jury service.
Requirements: To co-develop and deliver peer support training for former jurors, enabling people with lived experience of serving on complex and traumatic cases to support others.
Our solution: We co-developed a bespoke peer support training programme, delivered training to the first cohort of peer supporters, and continue to provide mentorship to build their capacity to lead.
Exploring crisis alternatives for young people: A youth-led feasibility study
Client: Frayme is a Canadian national network focused on transforming youth mental health and substance use systems. They commissioned Habitus to explore whether the internationally growing Recovery Café model could work in a Canadian context.
Requirements: To conduct a feasibility study on bringing an international, community-based, mental health crisis alternative model to Canada for young people, and to mobilise knowledge across Frayme's national network.
Our solution: We trained four young people with lived experience as peer researchers to co-lead the study, conducted desk-based and field-based research, and brought together leading groups across Canada in a national hackathon to design and test a "Made-for-Canada" crisis alternative model.
Managing a community health grants programme to reach underserved communities
Client: CNWL NHS Foundation Trust is a large NHS Foundation Trust providing mental health, addiction, and community health services across London and the surrounding area.
Requirements: To manage a community grants programme in the London Borough of Harrow, using an iterative learning approach to fund local organisations delivering innovative community health services to underserved populations.
Our solution: We managed the end-to-end grants programme, from proactive outreach and capacity building through to due diligence, contract management, and evaluation. We identified and supported three local community organisations to deliver befriending, benefits and practical advice, and reablement services for people with mental health needs.
Evaluating a community health champions programme to strengthen impact and enable scaling
Client: The London Borough of Waltham Forest partnered with Leyton Orient Trust, a community organisation focused on sport, health and wellbeing, to deliver a Community Health Champions programme. Habitus was engaged to evaluate the programme and provide foundations for scaling locally and nationally.
Requirements: To evaluate how the Community Health Champions programme was being implemented, understand its impact on health inequalities, and develop an evaluative framework that could support the programme to scale.
Our solution: We gathered insight through interviews with local residents, particularly those from marginalised communities, and through surveys. We co-developed an impact framework and Theory of Change with the team, and provided recommendations to strengthen the programme in its next phase.
Securing the future of a rural mental health charity
Client: Caithness Mental Health Support Group is a grassroots mental health charity supporting people living remotely and rurally in Caithness, in the Scottish Highlands. They run two welcoming hubs, The Haven in Wick and Stepping Stones in Thurso, open 365 days a year.
Requirements: To develop a new strategy, redesign services, and secure sustainable funding to keep the organisation's doors open during a period of leadership change and financial uncertainty.
Our solution: Over 14 months, we worked alongside the team to develop a new organisational strategy, designed innovative community-driven projects, and secured just over £300,000 in new funding, more than doubling their annual income.
Developing a peer programme for women affected by sexual exploitation
Client: Ruhama works with women who are actively involved in prostitution, are seeking to exit (leave) prostitution, are victims of sex trafficking, and/or have a past experience of prostitution/sex trafficking.
Requirements: A peer support recruitment, and training programme for their volunteers with lived experience, leading to a programme to leverage and augment their existing programme offers.
Our solution: A co-designed peer support training programme ready for accreditation.
Using evaluation insights to shape strategy: A six-year partnership
Client: AAWEAR (Alberta Alliance Who Educate and Advocate Responsibly) is a lived experience-led organisation based in Calgary, Canada, supporting people experiencing substance use, homelessness, and mental health challenges. The organisation is governed by a lived experience board and membership. Habitus has been AAWEAR's external evaluation partner for over six years, supporting its growth from a small project to an established not-for-profit.
Requirements: To provide ongoing evaluation support and use insights gathered to develop a new three-year strategic plan, including support during a change in leadership.
Our solution: Yearly impact evaluations using mixed methods, co-developed with staff who have their own lived experience. We used the insights gathered over years of evaluation work to inform the development of a new strategic plan, working alongside the lived experience membership and board to shape the organisation's direction. We also provided continuity and strategic support through a period of leadership transition.
Co-creating a city-wide anti-racism strategy through community voice
Client: The City of Calgary (population 1.4 million) is a municipal government in Alberta, Canada. Habitus Canada and Habitus UK partnered with ActionDignity to co-create a Community Anti-Racism Action Strategy for all local authority services and programmes.
Requirements: To design and deliver large-scale community engagement with Indigenous, Black, and other racialised groups to create actions that make Calgary a more equitable place to live.
Our solution: Habitus led the design, research, analysis, and strategy development, while our partner ActionDignity brokered relationships and connected us with communities across the city. We engaged with 4,000 community members through online events and workshops, co-analysed all feedback with key community members, and wrote the final Community Anti-Racism Action Strategy.
Addressing racism in public safety: Hearing from those most affected
Client: The City of Calgary (population 1.4 million) is a municipal government in Alberta, Canada. Following the success of the Community Anti-Racism Action Strategy, Habitus Canada and Habitus UK partnered again with ActionDignity to develop a Public Safety Anti-Racism Action Strategy.
Requirements: To engage with Indigenous, Black, and other racialised communities on their experiences of racism in public safety, including negative interactions with law enforcement and the justice system, and develop concrete actions for change.
Our solution: Habitus led the design, research, analysis, and strategy development, while ActionDignity connected us with communities across the city. We engaged 1,049 participants through online and in-person events, multilingual surveys, and community listening sessions, producing a comprehensive action strategy with five focus areas for systemic change.
Improving mental health in a multi-site, national high street bank
Client: ATB (Alberta Treasury Branches) is a mid-sized high street banking organisation, with over 5,000 employees serving 243 communities.
An organisation with a strong commitment to supporting their employees mental health, but struggling to engage at a proactive level. This was further exacerbated by a huge geographical footprint, making it more difficult to engage at an organisational level rather than a team-by-team and individual approach.
Requirements: Mental health and wellbeing intervention for the workplace.
Our solution: Virtual wellbeing campaign.
Using the right approaches and data to identify impact in a highly complex system
Client: Frontline is a large UK Charity that trains hundreds of new Children and Family Social Workers each year to Masters-level standard. They have hundreds of partnerships, multiple government and philanthropic funders, and over 2,000 alumni from their programmes.
Requirements: Aligning impact and data measurement approaches and tools to alumni activity and existing national data sets.
Our solution: An integrated impact approach, data sets, and training that provided detail, evidence and direction that was actionable and easily integrated into their existing operating strategies.
Introducing and integrating Peer Support into a health system
Client: Alberta Health Service is the largest health provider in Canada. Providing services to residents of Alberta. AHS is a public health provider (NHS Equivalent) employing more than 100,000 employees in 843 clinics with a budget of $15 Billion per annum. We worked with 15 mental health, addiction and public health teams.
Requirements: Evaluation, evidence gathering and impact identification, knowledge mobilisation, return on investment, and project scaling.
Our solution: Grant support, Strategic planning, Evaluation.