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.

Right. So a charitable trust that has been set up by a legacy from a Jewish woman to help other Jewish women and has been donated to by people who specifically want to help Jewish women should be unable to purchase the service it wants to buy from a charity that has the expertise to help their beneficiary group? The charity should say, oh no, we're not interested in using our expertise to help Jewish women with this problem you've identified they need help with unless you let us use the money you have raised to help Jewish people to benefit non Jewish women?

The problem with targeted funding like this is that there's no such thing as funding pots targeted to white, majority ethnicity children. The only pots they can access are the ones that every child can access. Believe it or not you do then get issues where poor white children struggle to access help, even more so than poor ethnic minority children. No one ever sets up a fundraiser limited to those children- can you imagine if they did? They would be accused of discrimination, every day of the week.

Is that not the exact opposite of what the pp was saying?

She's saying you can't set up a charity for ALL women and then say oh but you can't access our services unless you're Jewish (or white, or 'culturally diverse' or whatever.) Nothing wrong with having dedicated charities or services for specific groups of people.

Nothing wrong with a charity that's specifically set up to meet a need that applies to people with a certain characteristic. But everything wrong with being a charity devoted to everyone's mental health and then discriminating on the basis of skin colour.

I mean the university in the same area has a charitable funded scholarship aimed at only white working class boys so your argument is pretty flawed.

No, it's not the opposite to what the PP is saying. Its the practical outcome of what the PP is advocating for.
PP is saying that a women's charity that is not specifically set up for a sub group of women, such as Jewish women, should refuse to deliver a service that is specifically for Jewish women.
In practice that would mean that a trust that wants to buy a service for Jewish women from specialist women's charity should be refused by that charity.
This leaves the Jewish women's trust unable to buy the service it wants from the charity it feels best equipped to provide it. So the Jewish women lose out, the charity loses out and no non Jewish people gain.

When I worked for a council we were given funding to run courses for Syrian refugees. We were frequently audited and on one occasion one of the wives had enrolled but she had moved to Syria to be with her husband and wasn’t considered a refugee and therefore was ineligible. The funder insisted we removed her from the course. If MIND have been given funding for a specific group that is what they have to use it for or they face greater scrutiny taking up A LOT of their time and resources with the potential to help even less young people. It’s not right but clearly it is felt to be necessary.

@nomas

A simple way to think about it

If you imagine support access as a series of gates:

^Autistic children face many locked gates.
BME autistic children face even more gates, and some are harder to unlock due to systemic biases and cultural barriers.^

But this isn't just about children who are both BME and autistic. It's the idea that all BME children are somehow definitely more in need than any white British children, even if the BME person in question isn't autistic and the white British person is.

And anyway, when it comes to helping people it should be based on individual need rather than the group you happen to belong to!

Autistic people are routinely excluded from mainstream MH services btw. So it is very possible that a BME person who's not autistic can actually access services a white British person couldn't. So it's not as if all white British people are being served by the standard system (which is often the case in other areas where specialist services may be helpful for BME people).

Really the problem arises because MH services are so dire and virtually nonexistent for most people. It's not as if the general population is able to access suitable MH services with charities providing extra to targeted groups. It's the charities that are providing the ONLY support there is! So it seems awful to cut out certain groups. It's like if you had a homeless hostel for BME people only - fine if there's also a general hostel for everyone else. But if that's the ONLY homeless provision it would be horribly discriminatory!

[Btw genuine thanks for the list of autism charities offering counselling. Complete dearth in this area aside from MIND. Will be working through them and hoping to find something offered nationwide for the young person in question.]

From EHRC website:

Exceptions for charities
If you are a charity you are allowed to restrict your benefits (which include the services you offer) to people with a particular protected characteristic if:
that is included in your charitable instrument, and either
it is objectively justified, or
it is done to prevent or compensate for disadvantage linked to the protected characteristic.
A charitable instrument is the document establishing or governing a charity. The charitable instrument usually sets out the charity’s purposes, how its income can be spent and generally how the charity will operate.
For example:
The Women’s Institute is a charity which provides educational opportunities only to women.
The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) is a charity that provides special facilities for visually impaired people rather than to other disabled people.
However, charities cannot restrict their services on the basis of a person’s colour, such as ‘black’ or ‘white’. If the charitable instrument includes a restriction to people of a particular colour, it will be read as if that restriction did not exist.

(end section)

A charity can restrict its effort to people with a particular protected characteristic eg Jewish people, women, people of Somali descent, Polish immigrants etc, etc, but not based on skin colour.

What Mind are trying to do is target all people who have a protected characteristic which puts them in the minority in the UK with respect to that protected characteristic. But that's tantamount to being a close proxy for 'not white people'.

Would you find it acceptable to have a white only kids football club on the grounds that PoC are over represented in football?

All that research and you reached an entirely wrong conclusion about a charity that isn’t even the one under discussion.

Can you explain why a grant provider would decide to make a grant that would force a given charity to work against its charitable objects? And risk being deregistered as a charity?

Honestly, the lengths to which people will go to justify racism as long as it’s only against white people.

Can I ask the people supporting this discrimination on this thread if they’d be as chilled if it was a large charity excluding PoC for unspecified reasons?

No one on this thread has given any examples of a charity that caters exclusively for white kids. And with the ‘anti racists’ on the hunt, I know we’d have heard about such a thing if it existed.

Do you think playing sport is a as much of a right as access to mental health care?

And no ‘PoC’ are not over represented in football. Arguably black people are overrepresented in the English Premier League.

How is a service that has 4.3 million white users and 480k BAME users being discriminatory? They’re stopped taking referral from everyone.

The sponsor realises the ethnic communities are under served and is trying to make it more equitable.

No one on this thread has given any examples of a charity that caters exclusively for white kids. And with the ‘anti racists’ on the hunt, I know we’d have heard about such a thing if it existed.

The HAWWC is a project just for white boys.

They won't risk being deregistered if they can justify their reasons under the EA2010. Which they probably can, though I haven't looked into the detail.

Funders award funding in line with their own priorities. They also have to comply with the EA2010, but that doesn't mean that they can't prioritise particular groups if there is a legitimate reason for doing so.

Out of interest, would you be equally as outraged about mental health projects which are only aimed at people of certain ages (e.g. the under 25s or the over 65s)? Or about mental health projects that are only open e.g. to people with cancer?

No funding body is financing a charity to work AGAINST its aims. They are funding charities to work towards their aims with specific demographics of people.
This is so incredibly easy to understand that I'm starting to think those purporting not to are not here in good faith.
And the anti racists, is it? Are we not all anti racism here, then?

OP said the charity was Mind?

EHRC are entirely wrong?

I don’t see how BAME are ‘underserved’ unless applicants apply and are told ‘no, not you, you’re BAME. Yes fewer BAME people may try to access your service, but that’s up to them. You’re not ‘under serving’ them if they don’t come forward.

Yep. There are either an awful lot of people with a reading comprehension issue or there are a lot of people with a specific agenda that they're eager to push.

The HAWWC ‘charity’ does seem to be a research project, with the aim of working out strategies for boosting white working class boy’s achievement. The primary aim isn’t to give the research participants services, but to learn from the effect of giving those services. The giving of the service is a by product of the research project.

Okay, well I think tbh that's probably a fair pov if the service is discriminating against other service users. If you're meant to be a service for all women, but you then say you're only for women who have a certain skin colour or particular characteristic, then that's unfair. If you set up from the beginning to be a service only for women of a specific group, then that's different.

This response just shows such a complete ignorance as to what barriers there are to certain groups accessing these services. You can’t say simply ots up to them. I laid out earlier what some of the language, cultural and family barriers are for many people of colour or Asian communities accessing services. Your ignorance and blinkered thinking is beyond bizarre. I hope you have more of a social conscience and understand in real life the very real and challenging barriers for many, particularly Asian women to know about and feel comfortable seeking support in a culturally appropriate way.

I mean, I don't really get it either? If you are a British citizen then these services are open to you. If you don't speak the language, take a class (usually free in most areas.)

If you're not able to access services because your so-called culture has deemed you a second class citizen not worthy of leaving the house by yourself, then that's not really the fault of the services, is it? It's not British culture to keep women covered at home and not allowed to work or socialise. It's a good example of why immigrants need to assimilate to the host culture rather than simply importing their own and expecting everyone to provide services that support this. Which is of course a much bigger problem and won't be fixed by mental health services discriminating against white children. If you can't access the service for 'cultural' reasons, then the culture is the problem, not the service.

It is a service, they are teaching practicals to across various cities in the UK to influence behaviours that enable underachieving, less advantaged, young, white working class boys to experience more positive home learning experiences and access a quality, free early education place and improve their attainment.
And it is a service solely to benefit young white working class boys and their families.
So all other races are excluded.

And no one begrudges this, it’s a good thing.

Part of what Youth In Mind does is actively go to these marginalised kids. For example, in Bradford, they have initiatives around Pakistani kids after mosque time or during summer holidays.

Telling a charity they should be passive and just wait for these kids to approach them just shows how little understanding there is of marginalised communities.

As I’ve repeatedly stated and everyone has ignored and continued to claim where are no white focused schemes, the university local to this charity has a charitable funded scholarship program open only to working class white boys.
So yes there are things set up only for white people and white males. There’s one around the corner from this charity.