It’s time to talk about mental wellbeing
Today is Time to Talk Day, an annual campaign that aims to encourage people and their communities to get together and talk about mental health.
It’s the nation’s biggest mental health conversation run by Mind and Rethink Mental Illness and delivered in partnership with Co-op. Across the UK, it’s delivered by See Me in Scotland, Inspire in Northern Ireland and Time to Change Wales.
We want to build fairer, more co-operative communities and deliver on Co-op’s vision of ‘Co-operating for a fairer world’. We believe feeling comfortable and confident talking about our mental health – without judgement or stigma – plays a big part in helping us to do that.
Download a resource pack from the Time to Talk Day website to help you start conversations about mental health in your community or workplace.
Guided by young people
At the Co-op Foundation, we’ve been helping young people improve their mental wellbeing through funding and campaigns that put them in control since 2017. We delivered this work through our Belong programme – which aims to connect and empower at young people while also strengthening youth services – and our youth led behaviour change campaign, Lonely Not Alone, which aims to tackle the stigma of youth loneliness.
We asked young people to shape our vision for fairer, more co-operative communities and we felt it was only right they helped guide the decision-making for our campaign work, too. We did this by commissioning nationally representative research with young people to learn how we could turn their vision for future communities into a reality through our campaign work. This research revealed that health, especially mental wellbeing, was the strategic priority young people ranked as most important for us to campaign on.
We’ve now stopped promoting our Lonely Not Alone campaign but you can still explore the stories and messages – and download resources to help keep the conversation going about youth loneliness – at lonelynotalone.org