facilitator gives lecture to a group of parents for a training course

Consultancy and service design

We work with young people to change services and decisions that impact them.

About our consultancy and service design

YoungMinds service design consultancy will support you to commission, design and improve mental health support across a broad range of sectors, including but not limited to education, health and social care, youth justice, local and community services. 

How we work

A grey square in the middle reads 'service users'. Around the square circles a yellow arrow. Outside of the yellow arrow is a bigger orange arrow shaped in a circle. There are four different points on the circle 'plan, do, review, assess'.

An orange cycle with an arrow at the end. There are four yellow squares in the cycle. They read from the top going clockwise: Asses - understand the service they need, plan - use learning to map change, do - make the change, review - capture impact and iterate. Inside the orange cycle is another smaller yellow cycle with an arrow at the end. Inside the yellow cycle is a grey text box that reads: Service users

Our service design model focuses on cyclical learning, was co-designed with industry experts, and places service users at its centre.

Our model is guided by three principles:

  • We amplify young people’s voices, we don’t speak for them.
  • We think whole-systems, nothing is done in isolation.
  • We learn as we go, and evolve our approach for the biggest impact.

Read our case studies

From the NHS, to education and community commissioners, read the case studies of our past consultancy and service design work. 

Case studies

Our projects

Each project is tailored to your challenge and can be scaled depending on scope, timeline and budget. 

 

The tools we use include:

  • Consultancy
  • Audits and evaluation frameworks
  • Training
  • Insights
  • Resources and initiatives implementation

6-8 weeks

£3,000 - £5,000

We will support you with: 

  • Initial kick-off discussion
  • Audit and delivery plan
  • x1 deliverable e.g insight session, consultancy session report

3-6 months

£10,000 - £15,000

We will support you with: 

  • Everything in our bronze package
  • Bespoke deliverables e.g co-created resource, specialist in-house training, COPs, evaluation plan 

6 months +

£20,000 +

We will support you with: 

  • Everything in bronze and silver package
  • Ongoing support to create and implement e.g Theory of change, ongoing consultancy, training and supervision, participation network set up and support, service review and design

How we work with young people

We work with young people as part of our YoungMinds network and young people who have lived experience of specific services. Our YoungMinds network consists of our Activists, Youth Advisors and Youth Panellists.

Activists are volunteers aged 14 to 25 who have experience related to mental health and are from a range of backgrounds, cultures, ethnicities, sexualities and religions. Our Activists participate across all of YoungMinds projects and programmes to help raise awareness of the issues impacting youth mental health and improve the experience of young people with mental health problems.


The Activist Programme enables young people to have a stronger voice in the things that impact their mental health and the services they receive.

The Youth Panel discuss the big picture questions about YoungMinds as an organisation, like who we are, where we are going, or what we should do. The Youth Panel are involved in our strategy, safeguarding, fundraising, organisational culture, risk management, data protection, and brand and marketing.


The Youth Panel’s job is to understand how YoungMinds works, to help our staff and our Board of Trustees make the best decisions aligned with our mission. The discussions that we have with our Youth Panel help to shape the future of the charity.

Youth Advisors are young people who have completed our Activist and Youth Panel programmes. Youth Advisors are paid and recruited to support the Service Design team with specific projects. They are inducted with a strong knowledge of the commissioned project and form part of the consultancy team, attending meetings as appropriate. To help commissioners better understand a topic, our Youth Advisors speak out about the collective experiences of young people.

They will draw on their lived experience of participation to advise on the best way to involve young people in the project. Working with the Service Design lead, the Youth Advisor can co-design and deliver workshops with young people and co-develop discussion guides and other relevant resources.

As well as the Activist and Youth Advisor programmes, we recruit young people from other organisations or the public to help shape a project. We may decide to do this if we want to work with young people from specific backgrounds or with experience of a specific service, area or topic. We also work with young people linked to the organisations that we have partnerships with or commission us for a specific project.

Our commissioners

Education

We work with young people, staff, carers and community to create better outcomes in schools.

Understanding and learning the impact of Adverse Childhood Experiences and trauma-informed approaches in schools is vital as this has a significant impact on the culture and everyone involved in the school community.
Ann Berry, Public Health and Commissioning Manager

NHS

We work with professionals to develop the participation of young people and their families at every level of the mental health system.

Amplified has ensured improvement activities have been well rounded, anchoring CYP involvement in improvement initiatives by acting as a partner and critical friend. Their involvement has been a great example of how partners should work together holding a common objective of improving services for those who use them
Sarah Brennan, Mental Health Improvement Advisor

Community and voluntary

We amplify young people’s voices at a local and national level to engage in the decisions and actions made around their mental health.

It has been an interesting and enjoyable experience to work with YoungMinds to date and understand their collaborative working approach to youth engagement and how their approach seeks to empower and validate young people engaging with service and research development.
Amanda Bye, Research Associate

Want to commission us?

If you would like YoungMinds to support you in designing and improving mental health support within your work, filling out our briefing form below. A member of the service design team will aim to get back to you as soon as they can.




e.g. CAMHS professionals, young people, schools, inpatient
e.g. Increase staff knowledge of Mental Health, create resources for young people, shaping of service
e.g. Insights with young people, resource development
Start and end date/ duration e.g. 3 months.
We endeavour to cover project resource directly from commissioners however if this is not possible we would be interested in exploring alternative funding and/or resourcing models with you.

How we use your data
Your details will only be used by YoungMinds - we will never give your information to a third party organisation to use for their own purposes. View our privacy policy for more information.

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