Race on The Agenda (ROTA) has released a new report recommending for a refugee-led mental health service. The new report, Hardly Hard to Reach details finding from ROTA’s three-year Active Lives, Healthy Minds project.

Drawing on interviews with community members, volunteers and service coordinators, the report made the following specific seven recommendations:

i) Use an Intersectional approach when working with people from a refugee and migrant background

ii) Use a holistic, social model for supporting people from a refugee or migrant background with mental health challenges

iii) Work in a linguistically-inclusive way

iv) Be culturally sensitive and community specific

v) Involve community members and the organisations supporting them at every level

vi) Fund local authorities appropriately and ring fence grant funding

vii) End racist policies and practices.

 The project assisted partnership organisations and the community members they support in developing holistic, intersectional projects and activities to support their mental health and wellbeing in a culturally sensitive and non-stigmatising way.

The project supported well over a thousand people from the Eritrean, Nepali, Somali and Tamil communities over a period of three years, with a core group of 150 people attending weekly activities across the four partner organisations.