For the last three months The Young Foundation has been working with Mind to develop a programme targeting the mental health of older men who are out of work. Our goal was to work with them to discover the best ways to help build their resilience and reduce their risk of mental problems. As part... Find out more
Blog
The Young Foundation welcomes contributions from many sectors and standpoints - views expressed here are not necessarily held by The Young Foundation.
Ideas, as well as people, now move more freely. We have put new models, drawn from other classes and other parts of the world, before the local people, creating new aspirations and new ideas.Michael Young and Peter Willmott.
Family and Kinship in East London, 1957
It’s getting to be a habit…but not quite yet
Today the latest set of statistics on obesity, physical activity and diet were released. They paint an all too familiar picture. Levels of obesity are rising, and levels of physical activity continue to decline – despite last summer’s sporting successes. The Young Foundation outlined many of these issues in our report Move It, released last... Find out more
Community spirit and caring nature of Brits is reassuring
What are your most important values? You may not have been asked this question before, but it’s a very significant one. Our values shape every aspect of our lives; they determine what we care about, how we behave and what we prioritise. Perhaps your list would include honesty, achievement or independence? Or maybe trust, fairness... Find out more
Removing the Pump Handle of Poor Health: Early Action at Barts Health
Today’s Guest Blogger is Andrew Attfield, Associate Director for Public Health at Barts Health NHS Trust. Andrew attended our seminar on making early action a principle of public policy and we were intrigued by what he had to say about early action and health. For more on early action at The Young Foundation, you can... Find out more
Neglectful Britain?
How should we look after our ageing population and who should bear the weight of responsibility? Norman Lamb in his interview in The Daily Telegraph and Sarah Dittum in her response in Comment is Free, The Guardian both tackle the view that communities are neglectful of their ageing neighbours but with opposing answers At The... Find out more
Bringing Positive Psychology to the Streets of Jaffna
Armed with ten thousand postcards with happy smiling faces printed on them, a team of counsellors, psychosocial workers and I are hitting the streets of the Jaffna, Sri Lanka on a busy Wednesday morning. Our aim is to raise awareness about positive mental health and wellbeing. Today is World Mental Health Day, 10 October 2012, an... Find out more
Let’s go fly a kite
The skies above Galle Face Green, Colombo were full of handmade multi-coloured kites. Nothing unusual in this sight, as a long standing tradition and favourite pastime for families to come and spend hours flying their kites, eating ice cream, and walking along the beach at weekends. But this day is slightly different. The day is... Find out more
Can we make IT work in the NHS? I believe we can.
Technology adoption in the NHS has been an issue that has been studied by many of the great in health - including Professor Trish Greenhalgh, Alasdair Liddell, and countless others in the years past. The challenges that IT brings is similar to other challenges that NHS organisations face: lack of resources/money, leadership, communication within the organisation, risk aversion, lack of training... and list goes on. (In fact, there is a comprehensive list on p.29 of NHS Institute for Innovation's report from September 2009.)
Find out moreCommunity Activism: Making Change Happen
Our Building Local Activism programme, funded by The Big Lottery Fund, is supporting communities to develop their capability to instigate and sustain local activism, gaining power and influence over the decisions that affect them. One aspect of Building Local Activism is scaling up models of community activism that have already proven successful, to promote them across a wider scope.
Find out moreIn a recession, does wellbeing matter?
This morning the Office for National Statistics published its first findings from the national wellbeing index. The prominence of this index marks a significant shift in the value we place on, and indeed the way we measure, social progress. This is an important first attempt at moving away from understanding social progress in material terms to take a broader account of the attributes that add up to life satisfaction.
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