Open House Wellbeing

Open House Wellbeing exists to create safe spaces for young people in Cambridge and the surrounding area that promote positive wellbeing, build healthy relationships, and share the love of Jesus.

Open House Wellbeing projects have five core values that influence and guide all of our work:

Dignity: We believe that every person is created by God and loved by Him. They, therefore, have inherent value and worth and are deserving of respect. We seek to love and accept young people as they are, respecting their individual cultures, faiths, and experiences without judgement.

Relationship: We value personal connection and seek to foster a culture where young people can build healthy relationships with each other and with youth workers. The project seeks to be young person-centric, listening to their views, opinions, and experiences. Drawing alongside young people in relationship can then inform the development of the project.

Potential: We believe every young person has skills, a purpose, and a future. We endeavour to not only look at them from the perspective of who they are today but also their potential and who they will become. Part of our vision is to create spaces to come alongside young people to help them realise their potential and give them practical skills to reach it.

Generosity: We value giving and want this project to be a blessing to others.  As such we want our spaces to be accessible to all young people free of charge and for at least some food and drink to be provided for free. We also know that giving is great for our mental wellbeing and so as we model generosity, we want to encourage young people in this too.

Collaboration: Our desire is to work together with others. We recognise the wealth of passion, resources, and experience there is within the church and our city. We know that together, we can achieve more. The No. 40 Project exists as a partnership between Cambridge and District Youth for Christ and St Andrew’s Street Baptist Church. We have youth leaders from a number of local churches playing an intrinsic role in our mentoring programme and our desire is to continue to collaborate with the local church and other local youth organisations.

Our dream is to see Open House Hubs developed across Cambridge and the surrounding areas. An Open House Hub is

Hubs

Volunteer opportunities with Open House

Volunteer

Supporting young people in local schools

Mentoring

Outlining how we might invest in young people’s physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing

Wellbeing Pathway

Origin Story

Open House Wellbeing is a new initiative of Cambridge and District Youth for Christ, but its origins go back a few years. The inception of this project goes back to when one of our senior youth workers, Jax, shared with our Centre Director a dream for a bespoke space for young people in the heart of Cambridge. A space for young people to hang out and for them to meet youth workers who genuinely love them and are interested in their lives.

Fast forward to that fateful time at the end of 2019, into 2020 and onwards. Covid-19. Several of our projects had to stop, and we had to reshape and rethink how we worked. Coming out of this time we entered a phase of questioning, exploring, praying, and dreaming what the future of our work looked like. What projects were right to lay down, what had served its time but was no longer the right focus and what should we be investing in now. These conversations were driven by our love of young people. We were asking what are the needs young people are facing in our city and how can we help.

Before the start of the pandemic young people were experiencing loneliness and isolation, and mental health services were under-resourced and couldn’t keep up with the number of referrals. This need has grown exponentially.

Recent research concluded that 1 in 6 children aged 5 to 16 were identified as having a probable mental health problem in July 2020, a huge increase from 1 in 9 in 2017[1]. In 2018-19, 24% of 17-year-olds reported having self-harmed in the previous year, and 7% reported having self-harmed with suicidal intent at some point in their lives. 16% reported high levels of psychological distress[2]. However, just over 1 in 3 children and young people with a diagnosable mental health condition get access to NHS care and treatment[3] and three-quarters (76%) of parents said that their child’s mental health had deteriorated while waiting for support from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS)[4].

Liz Currie, a chaplain at Impington Village College, has said ‘friendships are broken, students are even more anxious than before lockdown and uncertainty of an unknown future is frightening for many. The uncomfortable feeling many experience is loss and grief for those times, people and opportunities we’ve lost and had taken from us. And many are living in a home which brings fear.’

Carole Rawley who works for the local charity Blue Smile said, ‘there is clearly a need for connection and community’.

The needs of young people in our city were clear and so we began to explore what role professional Christian youth workers could play in meeting this need. Out of this a new project, Open House Wellbeing, was born.

We developed a Wellbeing Pathway, outlining what our response might be and how we could collaborate with others. You can find out more about the wellbeing pathway here. Around this time, we were approached by St Andrew’s Street Baptist Church to explore how No. 40 St Andrew’s Street, which is part of the church building, could be used for mission and to serve young people in the community. This has developed into our flagship hub, No. 40, which you can find out more about here. Our team spent time exploring mentoring and chaplaincy in schools and developing a new mentoring programme. We had the opportunity to pilot this in two schools in St Neots followed by launching in a Cambridge city school in February 2023. Alongside these developments, local businessman Michael Scott approached us about re-starting a Social Enterprise and Business Challenge in schools. We delivered this in St Bede’s school in 2023 with a vision to further grow and develop the programme. You can read more about the Social Enterprise and Business Challenge here.

And this is all just the precursor, the prelude, the prologue. Because whilst there is so much from the last two years to celebrate and be thankful for, we believe there is so much more to come. So watch this space as we seek to create safe spaces for young people in Cambridge and the surrounding areas that promote positive wellbeing, build healthy relationships and share the love of Jesus.

Footnotes

[1] NHS Digital (2020): ‘Mental Health of Children and Young People in England’, prevalence survey. Available at: https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/mental-health-of-children-and-young-people-in-england/2020-wave-1-follow-up (accessed 11/01/2022)

[2] NCB and UCL research (November 2020), Available at: https://www.ncb.org.uk/about-us/media-centre/news-opinion/one-six-report-severe-mental-health-difficulties-age-17 (accessed 11/01/2022)

[3] NHS Five Year Forward View for Mental Health dashboard. Available at: https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/nhs-mental-health-dashboard/ (accessed 11/01/2022)

[4] YoungMinds (2018) ‘A new era for young people’s mental health’. Available at https://www.youngminds.org.uk/media/5dilibjw/a-new-era-for-young-peoples-mental-health.pdf (accessed 11/01/2022)