Catherine Ward, Public Mental Health Lead at Leeds City Council
Public Health, Leeds City Council and Leeds Community Foundation have worked in partnership to set up the Leeds Men’s Suicide Prevention Grants Programme that funds Third Sector organisations in order to, for the first time, work directly with men who are the highest at risk group for suicides in Leeds. The work had to be targeted where our data showed the need was the greatest.
The work produced by the grant recipients is really excellent with varied approaches used across the projects. We were very keen to get every partner involved in the grants work in the same room to share the learning and try to capture this, so that we had something we could share wider as a city and perhaps wider still.
The event took place in February this year in the form of a learning celebration and saw project workers and men with lived experience from all of the nine grants sharing their experiences and insights. We all agreed at the end of the event that we would produce this handbook so that the learning would not get lost and anyone who wants or is working with this target group would find this resource practical and effective.
We are happy to build on this work as a city and we have just completed our third round of funding awarded in April 2020. Every successful application/organisation for 2020 has been given a copy of the handbook and we are keen to follow up how they are using it and how we can keep on learning, adding and updating it.
The handbook is available by clicking here.
Finally here is a quote from one of the partners who helped with making this handbook possible:
Many thanks for forwarding this – it was a tremendous session and it was good to be in the same room as other organisations and finding out how they went about delivering their work. It was a very well thought out and executed grant scheme – thank you and your team for their part in it. It was a pleasure to be able to give something that will, hopefully, help to reduce the startling and worrying stats.
