Merseyside Youth Association’s RAISE Mental Health Promotion Team specialise in the promotion of mental health and resilience to children & young people.
As a team, they strive to improve the knowledge and understanding of mental health among children and young people promoting the message that “Children and young people’s mental health is everyone’s business”.
RAISE Mental Health Promotion Team Projects
We design and deliver an ongoing programme of Bitesize training opportunities. Underpinned by therapeutic models, the training is designed to educate and empower professionals, parents and carers as we strive to improve the knowledge and understanding of mental health among children and young people.
Most of our sessions are just one hour long, free, and delivered live. They’re accessible online, and if you’re a parent or carer, you can even join anonymously if you prefer.
Our training menu constantly evolves, and each subject is carefully researched and developed by clinicians or professionals working in the field of children and young people’s mental health.
The RAISE Mental Health Promotion Team’s NOW Festival aims to mobilise schools and youth groups (ages 9-19) to produce a 10-15-minute-long drama/dance/music or filmed performance around a chosen theme centred around mental health.
The ROAR programmes began with ROAR Response to Mental Health in Primary Schools, developed to support a whole-school approach and equip staff with practical, evidence-based ways to respond to children and young people experiencing mental distress underpinned by building resilience in children and young people.
The ROAR Family grew to meet the specific needs of different settings and audiences, including ROAR Secondary, Whole School Approach, Staff and Supervision, Early Years, SEND, Response to Racial Trauma, and ACEs and Trauma-Informed Practice. Each programme is underpinned by the same ethos of enabling professionals to identify signs of distress and take meaningful, practical action, supported by comprehensive training materials and access to an online resource portal.
The ‘How Serious is Serious’ suicide prevention model has been developed by RAISE Mental Health Promotion Team – Merseyside Youth Association, working in partnership with Wirral CAMHS and YPAS.
The programme’s content has been guided by parents of young people who have died by suicide, children and young people’s participation groups and mental health professionals. Its development was funded by the Liverpool CDOP (Child Death Overview Panel) in response to growing concerns about the number of children and young people who end up looking to suicide as the only answer to the difficulties they are facing.
REACT aims to equip trainers to be able to deliver five sessions across a five week block, to a group of around six young people each time they deliver. The sessions are informed by cognitive therapy and behavioural therapy, especially in response to exploring thoughts, feelings and behaviour patterns around anxiety. Each session is designed to last around 50 minutes, and are designed to easily be slotted into the school day, or adopted in other youth settings.
ROCKET is a one-day, interactive course aimed at primary-aged children. It enables them to become resilience champions within their schools.
The group’s role is to examine what the school already does to promote resilience, identify areas for improvement, and suggest ways for the resilience champions to improve. The focus is on mental health and how children can support their mental health and that of others.
Designed and developed by young people for young people, ‘Talking Openly To Embrace Mental Health’ (TOTEM) gives them the skills to become confident peer mentors with a specific focus on mental health and emotional well-being.
It empowers them to champion mental health and tackle stigma within their school or organisation.
Youth Connect 5 is a course that gives parents and carers across Cheshire and Merseyside the knowledge, skills and understanding to help children develop strong emotional wellbeing through resilience-building techniques.
These techniques will strengthen a child’s ability to adapt well to adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even stress, skills that will remain with them into adulthood. We like to think of it as being able to bounce back from difficult experiences.
Liverpool’s Growing Stronger Programme is designed to help people of all ages grow and recover from Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).
ACEs can impact how we think, learn, act, and grow. However, this does not mean that experiencing adversity will always lead to serious negative consequences. There are many ways to help ensure a positive outcome.
Merseyside Youth Association’s RAISE team delivers training as part of the Liverpool ACE action plan.
Funded by the Merseyside Violence Reduction Partnership (VRP), Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) is a peer education programme that provides young people with the language and framework to explore and challenge the attitudes, beliefs and cultural norms that underpin gender-based violence, bullying and other forms of abuse, while building resilience and promoting positive mental health.
The programme empowers pupils to identify and communicate concerns with peers and school staff by supporting schools to take a ‘whole school’ approach to early intervention and prevention of bullying, harassment, and risky behaviours.
One of The Liverpool Mental Health Support for Children and Young People’s Partnership’s aims is to make the mental health and emotional wellbeing of children and young people ‘Everyone’s Business’. In doing so, the RAISE mental health promotion team want to make sure that you, the children and young people, parents and carers and members of the workforce have a say on how services are delivered and get involved with Liverpool’s Mental Health Support.
Participation is at the heart of what we do because it’s important that your voices are heard and that they inform the delivery of the Liverpool Offer.
Parents and carers
Each month, a parents group comes together at MYA. The meetings vary from discussions on a wide range of topics about mental health, support and services to just to catch up and socialise doing activities that are good for your own mental health.
Youth Participation
Nearly everything we do involves the participation of children and young people (up to 25 years) so that young people have a voice around mental health and emotional wellbeing. From planning city-wide events, open mic nights, filming, steering groups, focus groups, workshops, website development and much, much more!