Limiting MH support to certain cultural areas?

[Mindcultural]

I have today received this message below from a mental health support service for young people.

AIBU to think it’s completely wrong to offer support based on cultural diversity and would like to know how they decide who fits this criteria?

Hi,

I’m getting touch as you have recently made a referral to our Youth In Mind services on behalf of a child or young person.

Unfortunately, we are having to reduce the size of the team for funding reasons, so we now only have funding to support young people from culturally diverse communities, if this is relevant for the individual you referred to us, please can I ask that you complete this form forms.office.com and we will be back in touch accordingly.

If we are now no longer able to offer support to the individual you have made a referral for, please accept our apologies for this. Please feel free to keep an eye on our website for updated information regarding available services as we are always looking for new funding opportunities to allow us to reach more children and young people.

Why don't you contact the charity and find out. It may be that they have hired staff with particular skills. You'll only know if you ask them.

Well done for finally being honest I guess. Helping brown women? No, you should close down.

Honestly can you hear yourself? No point engaging with you any further.

OMG how can you say that? Don't you know GASP that @Cucumberino has a black friend? An actual black friend!

It is.

But some activities are about directly addressing experiences. No point having a group discussing experiences of racism with young people who haven’t experienced racial, is there?

As I’ve already said, it’s holding yourself out as open to all when accepting donations, then restricting services only to one subset that’s the issue. If you’re a Bangladeshi women’s charity and provide services to Bangladeshi women, that’s totally fine!

Surely the money doesn’t disappear- it will be claimed by a charity that does cater to those aims?

That’s totally different from 1:1 therapy sessions though isn’t it? Andy’s man club works well because it’s just for men and men feel they can open up. Just like it’s incredibly important that services such are La Leche League and Rape Crisis Scotland are just for women.

If you gave money to my generic women's charity as a donor who simply wanted to help women, then your money would go into the unrestricted funding pot and could be spent on helping any woman.
If you were a grant making trust that gave my charity money because you wanted us to help Bangladeshi, or Jewish or young women, or women who had been raped, because you know our experience means we are well places to help the women you have a particular interest in, and instead we spent that money on helping women not from these groups, or on men who need our service, would that not also be unethical?

You’re just a farcical person you really are!

There is a women’s charity. It just calls itself a women’s charity. I fund raise for it. Then they tell me later that no, I can’t access their services because they only give services to brown women. Can you see how I might feel that I’d been misled?

Yes of course. But I would have expected you to say to the funders ‘sorry, we’re a generic women’s charity so don’t discriminate, we don’t want your funding’. And leave the funding for the Jewish women’s charity or whatever.

Its a charity not a paid service, donating to a charity doesn’t mean that anyone would be eligible for their services. I’m not sure why you’re making that link.

No I don't, I am not au fait with their services but it doesn't matter. Optics do and for such an inflammatory topic right now they should know better.

Actually putting in writing "Unfortunately, we are having to reduce the size of the team for funding reasons, so we now only have funding to support young people from culturally diverse communities" will be screen shot and shared all over the media, obviously. Of course this will lead to widespread misinterpretation. it is a dumb move and poor communication. Their comms should be more comprehensive to avoid any misinterpretation of facts and context. It is too costly otherwise.

Editid for autocorrect typos

Absolutely spot on. The ignorance and ridiculousness on this thread and wilful lack of understanding is astounding

people don’t seem to grasp that working within a specific community isn’t just about giving a person from say the an appointment over a white English person. There are distinct barriers to them accessing that support in the first place leading to a higher level of MH issues. Some of those are language barriers - the counsellors may need to speak other languages, cultural barriers - accessing mental health support is seen as shameful and something that needs to be kept in the family and not shared publically. Maybe that support needs to be delivered in safe spaces such as cultural community centre or schools because members of the community won’t go to MIND offices because of the stigma. Perhaps services can only be delivered by women for women and men for men.

As said about 500 times on this thread. Your donations don’t fund this kind of work. Specific pots from specific funders do. It doesn’t take away from supporting the wider community because if they have money to do wider work they will do but almost certainly they’re not winning those bids or people aren’t donating enough to run those services. They’ll be trying all they can to deliver universal services

it would be utterly ridiculous and completely wrong to close a charity because they are having specific projects for specific cohorts if they can’t CURRENTLY fund a bottomless universal service

This is the last time I’ll reply because I think you’re posting in bad faith. But for anyone else reading.

The charity provides more than one service. This particular project is for children and young people who have experienced trauma. It’s funded by philanthropic funders (not individual donors) and is designed to meet the needs of a wide group of people, with some specific strands to meet needs of some specific groups. The girls group may well include discussion and activity around sexual or domestic violence, so fairly obvious that it would be single sex. The culturally diverse group is difficulty to interpret without seeing the criteria, but could include CYP who have experienced racism or discrimination because of their ethnicity or where they live. It doesn’t seem complicated to me that a project around trauma would recognise that talking about these things with people who have similar experiences would be helpful. But for some people it obviously is.

Don’t be so stupid. Of course they accept the money and thy deliver that service whilst trying to fund a generic service. Better than the whole charity closing. By them turning down money to support Jewish women the funder isn’t then going to say “oh ok, why don’t you have the money anyway and spend it on what you like” never going to happen.

You’re holding yourself out as one thing when collecting donations, but another thing when providing services.

They’ve probably had ringfenced funding for that specific minority group and won’t be allowed to spend it on anyone else.

I work for a funded organisation (not a charity our funding is mainly through different government programmes). We are set targets by our funders based on their priorities so for example x amount of unemployed, x amount living in certain disadvantaged catchment areas, x amount parenting alone, x amount disabled, x amount traveller/roma, x amount ethnicity, x amount at risk of homelessness etc so although we are restricted with who we work with based on a number of factors I have never seen it as limited as this charity. In general with the target groups and community we work in most can fit one of our boxes so we can work with them. As I said these targets are set by our funders not us but we can identify and Inform them if there are any vulnerable groups we come across that are not included so targets can be expanded.

The restricted services won't be funded by donations from the public.

This is the bit people are not listening to and making themselves look more and more ignorant

They aren’t though, it’s clear from their website they have various services all with different barriers as such to entry, some available to all ages, some capped at 15, some capped at 13, some only open to those in education etc. there is no suggestion that they have unlimited services available to anyone at all times.

I've just gone on the charity's website and ironically, their slogan is 'Better mental health for all'.
Sounds like they may need to alter that and take away the 'all'?
'

Ther is a suggestion that it's for everyone in their slogan"Better mental
health for all".

It gets tricky if all the unrestricted funds (donations) were going into admin and fundraising and if there is only one service being provided and that is a service whose funding is restricted to a specific subgroup - the Bangladeshi women in your example. Because in that case no-one outside the subgroup benefits and if that went on for long then it would be hard to argue that this really is a general women's charity?

You’re looking at a different thing though, the youth section is different, firstly it’s obviously capped at different ages depending on various factors so no it doesn’t say “for all” from the get go.

The first note on the relevant youth site is “We are not currently taking referrals. Please contact [email protected]with any questions.”

If anyone is truly curious about their funding streams and different initiatives they can obviously reach out.

“Full details of who we are currently funded to support can be found on our referral forms: ‘support for myself‘ or ‘support for someone else‘. Read more under ‘Youth in Mind projects‘.”

Its clear they have different funding initiatives for specific projects.