Breathe awarded Maudsley Charity bid for Creative Mental Health Programme for Children in Care

We’re delighted to announce that following a 6-month development phase in collaboration with Lewisham Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) earlier this year, we’ve been successful in our joint bid to deliver a 3-year, co-designed creative mental health programme accompanied by ground breaking research for children and young people in local authority care.

As a leading social enterprise working at the intersection of arts, health, and science, we at Breathe know that genuine engagement and co-design is key —especially for children and young people who find engagement with traditional mental health services challenging. Thanks to an initial development grant from the Maudsley Charity’s Building Brighter Futures fund, we were able to take the time to scope out a bold, creative and deeply participatory model for mental health support – led by the voices and needs of children in care themselves.

The development phase

Over six months, we worked with the amazing team at Lewisham CAMHS to bring together artists, foster carers, social workers, healthcare professionals, researchers and, most importantly, young people, to rethink what support could and should look like. We saw first-hand how creativity—when placed at the centre of support—can build trust, encourage expression and improve engagement with mental health services to improve outcomes.

Our creative approaches engaged young people in care who might otherwise disengage, encouraged community and gave young people confidence to connect with CAMHS. Across every session, the arts allowed young people to express themselves with greater openness, confidence and authenticity.

On receiving the news our funding bid was successful, our close lead collaborator, Dr Rani Samuel, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, shared:

We aim to harness the arts to transform mental health support for children in local authority care. This funding will help us improve engagement, nurture wellbeing and build trusting relationships to improve outcomes.

Looking ahead

Our three-year programme will provide a year-round creative mental health offer for young people in care, utilising multiple art forms all designed to meet the specific needs of this group. A pioneering research study will accompany the programme so we can measure the outcomes of our creative health intervention for this community, enabling us to develop a replicable model to benefit more young people in the future.

We are so proud to be part of a wider movement imagining better mental health care for young people in South London and beyond. With this programme we are putting creativity at the heart of support—an approach that honours lived experience, prioritises co-design, and brings the transformative power of the arts into the heart of care.

Thanks to the support of Maudsley Charity, we will be spending the next three years working creatively with and for young people in care - putting their voice, their opinions and their needs right at the heart of new service design. Innovation, collaboration and evidence are central to our approach. We are delighted to be partnering with academics from the University of Cambridge to embed robust evaluation and research into the heart of this project. Our commitment to evaluation and data collection will ensure the investment and support from Maudsley Charity, leaves a legacy, enabling us to support the mental health of more young people beyond the life of this funding.
Yvonne Farquharson, Founder & Managing Director, Breathe Arts Health Research

Watch this space as we update on our progress over the next three years!

For press enquiries please see our press release and get in touch with Georgia (Breathe Communications Manager).