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North East partnership secures £242K funding to tackle inequality for children

 

Child Health and Wellbeing Network

 

Thanks to NHS Charities Together, Newcastle Hospitals Charity, County Durham Community Foundation and CDDFT Charity for supporting us with funding of £242,650.00 from the Covid-19 Community Partnership Grants Programme (North East and North Cumbria). This generous funding will enable our unique partnership between the North East and North Cumbria Child Health and Wellbeing Network (CHWN), NE Youth, Children North East and the collaboration STAR (South Tees ARts) Project led by TIN Arts. This programme is specifically designed to tackle inequalities for children across the region by:

  • Embedding Youth Mental Health First Aid skills to those most in need through VCSE organisations working in local communities.
  • Delivering a collaborative arts intervention with wrap around support for young people and families attending primary schools in our most deprived neighbourhoods
  • Tackling barriers that prevent access to health care caused through financial struggles and the impact on mental health in young people
  • Working with an apprentice to ensure we engage effectively through social media with our communities

Driven by CHWN, our organisations work in partnership across sector boundaries, combining skills knowledge and expertise to tackle health inequalities, limiting the collateral damage that Covid-19 has caused. CHWN membership across Health, Education, VCSE and Social Care, coupled with a robust children and young people voice, defined the most urgent areas of support post pandemic; these are Poverty, Mental Health, Family Support and Communication. TIC (Tackling Inequalities for Children) focuses on these ‘given’ areas of need.

Child Health and Wellbeing Network

This project is supported by a Marketing and Communications Apprentice, based within NE Youth, who will work closely with teams, delivering health promotion opportunities to children and young people regionally in an accessible and relevant format.

The two core areas that this project will deliver:

  1. A regionwide focus on systemic health inequalities
  2. An innovative cross sector project offering wrap around delivery within a defined locality.
Regionwide Tackling Inequalities Focus

CHWN will provide a train the trainer programme (allocated to our 4 geographical areas: Durham, North Cumbria, Northumberland and Tees Valley) embedding Youth Mental Health First Aid (YMHFA) skills into communities that need it most. Children NE will have a specific focus on tackling barriers to engagement within health settings. This innovative, newly designed and piloted, ‘Poverty Proofing© Health Settings’, includes powerful consultation with those living in poverty, to understand the wide and varied barriers caused through financial struggles, on access to health provision, leading to co-produced solutions and systemic change. Delivery will include an offer of training for health setting and partner organisation staff on mental health first aid and the impacts of poverty.

Tackling Inequalities within a defined locality

TIN Arts will lead in Tees Valley, to undertake and test a ‘deep dive’ initiative centred around an arts-based intervention (South Tees ARts Project – STAR) working with young people and families connected to schools in two severely deprived neighbourhoods, utilising further complimentary approaches including social prescribing, family support interventions, YMHFA and Poverty Proofing. This unique collaborative programme will identify new ways of combatting the negative impacts of mental health by tackling the consequences of poverty, providing family support utilising community assets and delivering arts based innovation to support a community to thrive, whilst simultaneously generating region wide learning that can be replicated. The pictures in this article share some of the great work already happening a part of the project!

Child Health and Wellbeing Network

 

We look forward to sharing updates as this work progresses. Find out more and link to partner websites through the links and emails below:

 

Child Health and Wellbeing Network Partners

 

Photography by Ian Paine