“The Hive has definitely helped my mental health. Having a place where I can socialise and meet new people has been very beneficial.
“The workers are all friendly and attentive, which makes the space welcoming, and the workshops are all great too.”
– J.T., service user aged 19
Catch22’s The Hive is a mental health and wellbeing service that supports young people aged 16-24 in Camden, London.
The service provides help and advice on matters such as:
- mental health and wellbeing,
- managing anxiety and depression,
- personal development,
- sexual health,
- education,
- employment,
- substance misuse, and
- signposting to other services where appropriate.
Many young people who visit The Hive each year have multiple complex needs – they may be facing homelessness after leaving care, substance misuse, traumatic childhood experiences or general anxiety and depression.
The Hive delivers a flexible and holistic service that quickly adapts to the young person’s individual needs through one-to-one mentoring sessions, a social hub with workshops and activities, sexual health outreach clinic and an employment support hub.
Our approach considers each young person as a whole – focusing on key areas that support positive mental health and wellbeing:
- friends and family,
- routines,
- activities,
- basic needs, and
- professional networks.
We listen and ensure that young peoples’ voice are heard and provide help and advice on key matters.
Partners
The Hive is delivered in partnership with:
- Camden Council,
- Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust,
- Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust,
- Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust,
- The Anna Freud Centre
- The Brandon Centre,
- The Winch, and
- Fitzrovia Youth in Action.
Outcomes
The Hive has had an exciting year showcasing the benefits of its service model.
Policy
We have raised our service profile by influencing policy makers, feeding into the Labour party’s announcement of the Young Futures programme and the plan to halve knife crime. As part of this policy, Labour’s plan is to introduce youth hubs across the country. The MP for Enfield North, Feryal Clark, had a successful meeting earlier this year, in which they visited The Hive to better understand how it is delivered.
The Hive also had a visit from the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, as they are writing a report on child poverty and mental health with Save the Children and one of their key recommendations looks at early support hubs. The Hive is now referenced as a case study in this report to demonstrate our wrap-around holistic support model.
Funding
The Hive demonstrated great evidence in improving young people’s wellbeing by being part of the Camden’s Social Prescribing pilot in 2022-2023. Following this, we successfully won our bid for a two-year contract to deliver The Hive Social Prescribing bolt-on from Camden Council.
We have also secured new additional targeted grants and funding, allowing us to appoint two new specialist workers within our Hive staffing model. This has enhanced our service offer and has engaged new cohorts of young people who may find mental health services less accessible. The two new roles are a Young Men’s Project Coordinator and a National Citizenship Service Programme Coordinator.
Staffing
For the past year, an operational challenge has been the strain of the cost of living which has impacted our recruitment process, and led to low staffing which has impacted on service delivery. Recently, however, we have seen our staffing model be staffed to near full capacity.
Social Hub
The Hive Social Hub found that its key performance indicators were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, with a significant decrease in the number of visits and individual young people accessing the service from Q1 of 2023.
In response to this, we formatted a mapping exercise to improve this element of our service, following four key stages:
- consult (Q1),
- prepare (Q2),
- re-launch (Q3), and
- achieve (Q4).
Following this work, we can proudly say that The Hive’s Social Hub has achieved its KPI targets, with a total of 1,777 visits in the last year, and 325 individual young people accessing the Social Hub.
Key performance indicators
Further successes achieved by The Hive in relation to its key performance indicators this year include:
- 173% increase in the number of individual visits from Q1 to Q4.
- 272% increase in the number of total visits from Q1 to Q4.
- 397% increase in the number of new Social Hub registrations from Q1 to Q4.
- 4,600% increase in the number of young people who attended The Hive more than nine times in one quarter, from Q1 to Q4.
- 265% increase in the number of non-white young people attending The Hive from Q1 to Q4.
- 325% increase in the number of black young people attending The Hive from Q1 to Q4.
- 313% increase in the number of young males attending The Hive from Q1 to Q4.
“I would love to recommend The Hive, because it has provided me with a space to receive one-to-one mental health and life management support, as well as social support and opportunities to spend time with friends without spending my finances on an activity or outing.”
– Service user
Impact
The Hive has been operating for over seven years and has a good track record of delivering good outcomes for young people in Camden: it was mentioned in the NHS Long-Term Plan as a successful example of 0-25 mental health service provision.
This year, The Hive has improved mental health outcomes and transitions for young people in Camden. As a trusted service with strong referral mechanisms, external services and self-referrals are being streamlined effectively.
We have proven to have significant experience of supporting vulnerable young people aged 16-24 years old facing adverse childhood experiences, including social deprivation, neglect, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, witnessing domestic abuse and parental substance abuse, and having parents who suffer from mental ill health.
The team follow the AMBIT approach in mentalising our young people, staff, and those in the young person’s network (family friends and professionals), working together to provide the best possible care and support with the young person at the centre.
To demonstrate this, young men at The Hive have been asked, this year, to set three goals for themselves (e.g. managing emotions or seeking employment). Progress towards these goals has been monitored by comparing the ‘Goal Based Outcomes (GBO)’ scores before and after interventions. To date, over 65% of young people engaged at The Hive had shown a reliable change in their goals.
Impacts like this have helped us to secure new additional targeted grants and funding, allowing us to appoint specialist workers for our Hive staffing model.
This year, we have also expanded our service offer to provide a wider range of services at The Hive. Embedding new contracts into our service delivery has been invaluable, as it has allowed us to support new cohorts of young people to seek their potential. This has allowed us to be even more creative with our holistic approach, focusing on key areas that support positive mental health and wellbeing: friends and family, routines, activities, basic needs, professional networks.
We have been adjusting to occupying the whole of The Hive premises this year, which required some creative thinking to ensure young people still feel able to drop in to our service Monday- Friday from 10am-7pm. However, The Hive premise being back to full capacity has showcased the development of new partnerships, and allowed us to deliver more targeted projects to meet the needs and interests of young people in Camden.
To support this, this year we went through a rebranding phrase of marketing, branding, promotion and revamping the physical building to give it a new look to attract more young people. The feedback of this revamp has been positive from young people and professionals.
In summary, we have been able to raise our profile this year by doing more outreach work into schools, hosting events, running more specialist targets projects, working in partnership, championing co-production working with young people, strengthening our employment offer and delivering more varied drop-in daily activities that meet the needs and interests of young people in Camden.
Challenges
Despite these successes, The Hive has faced a number of challenges this year too:
- Service demand: The Hive is recognised as an established service, and it is great that we are shaping and influencing people to see the benefits of our service model. However, there is a high level of demand, and it needs a very fast pace to manage the service need with our Hive staffing model.
- Foot-fall: We need to achieve a high foot-fall of service users who are accessing our premise before Camden Council review their concerns about the building being under-used. In particular, the Counil are keen for The Hive to generate income for the building.
- Recruitment and retention: For half of the year, we have not been in a position to embed our full staffing model. This has impacted on our flexible drop-in service, our weekly Social Hub provision, our one-to-one support waiting list timescales, outreach work, and our employment offer.
- Apprenticeships: The Hive has a social value framework contractual commitment to secure apprenticeships within Catch22 for young people in Camden. This has been hard to meet due to changes in the apprenticeship hub model within Catch22.
- Risk: The service deals with significant risk and, at times, the team are the only service in the network.
- Crisis support: Some services see us as a crisis service, however we do not deliver this type of service.
- Exits: Young people turning 25 do not have another service to access after The Hive. Whilst we prepare young people to exit, this is still very difficult.
Working in partnership
Our Hive service values are working in partnership: engineering a community between young people and Camden services, to create positive relationships that provide a more cohesive and empowering support pathway.
The strength and uniqueness of The Hive is that, through the partnership, we are able to provide holistic, integrated and wide-ranging offers to young people under one roof. The Hive’s partnership is highly experienced in ensuring successful transitions between services and the best outcomes for young people. We have a team of multidisciplinary workers, with Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) and Adult Mental Health Service (AMHS) clinicians seconded from the NHS working together on cases, and supervising a team of experienced workers to provide the very best of youth and mental health work.
We are the incumbent of the Hive, which is jointly commissioned by Camden Clinical Commissioning Group and Camden Council. It is led by Catch22 in partnership with Camden and Islington, Central and North West London, and Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trusts, The Anna Freud Centre, The Brandon Centre, The Winch, and Fitzrovia Youth in Action. This year, we reviewed our strategic board agenda and board members to help streamline our direction.
Our partnership (which includes mental health trusts, local authority, and experts in youth work) provides safe, effective services, by harnessing the diverse expertise of each partner to create a tailored provision that works with young people holistically.
Partnerships continue to be one of our most successful areas of growth. We are working with both local and national organisations to deliver more versatile projects and introduce young people to different opportunities and experiences.
Not all of our partnership providers are under the umbrella of mental health, however. This year we have broaden our partnership working to enhance our service offer in creative arts, fitness,and employment.
We have established partnership work with providers such as Street League, Sainsbury’s, Getir, Marks & Spencer, Pret A Manger, Round House, Camden Art Centre, Tate, JW3, Camden Council, Real Talk, Detached Team, Life Drawing Class, The Running Charity, the Department for Work and Pensions, College of North West London, Fashion Hope FX project, St John Ambulance, FWD, Brook, Youth Legal, Dance Works, Swiss Cottage College, Juicy Roots, Drive Forward, and more.
A particular area of growth has been our free food offer. Every week we receive 25+ crates of food from Marks & Spencer, Getir and Pret A Manger. Our highest- visited days correlate with our food deliveries, and many young people rely on the donations for their weekly meals.
Another good example of partnership work has been with The Roundhouse, who ran a series of circus skills workshops at The Hive and in their brand-new studios. 15 young people were able to receive grants to their youth programme, allowing them to access their studios and creative programmes for free.
Finally, we also worked with the Tate Modern, who gave 20 young people a private screening of their new exhibition, a spoken word performance and dinner over the Thames. For most of the young people, this was their first time at the Tate and it introduced them to the free art that’s available in London
Voice of the young person
The Hive is a ‘community’, led by young people. Co-designing and working co-productively with young people empowers them to use their voice, make informed decisions and positive life choices.
This year we have continuously sought feedback from young people by implementing our established evaluation framework, which sets out the activities we undertake to meaningfully consult with young people. Our consultation is focused on engaging with young people to understand the effectiveness of our interventions in improving their wellbeing through increased access to support services in Camden.
This has included:
- questionnaires and suggestion boxes,
- using incentives for young people to take ownership and feel empowered to be heard,
- allowing young people to have an input into their one-to-one goals work,
- facilitating a monthly ‘Youth Board’,
- facilitating one-to-one steering groups,
- inviting young people to attend our quarterly strategic board meeting,
- asking young people to support us with identifying gaps in our provision,
- asking young people to support us with drafting protocols (e.g. The Hive sensory space),
- involving young people in recruitment,
- inviting young people to deliver sessions on the Hub to their peers, and
- allowing external services to consult our young people in areas of mental health.
At The Hive there are no barriers to hearing young people’s voices as young people are key to help shape and influence our service.
Future plans
The Hive is expanding, and we have been successful at securing additional funding to enhance our service offer through the creation of new specialist roles and new projects. We also have new funding bids in the pipeline that will open up new opportunities if successful
In addition to these potential new opportunities, The Hive’s future plans are focused on the below areas.
- We want to be a flagship service and champion our service to be replicated in other boroughs.
- We would like to bridge the gap with marginalised young people in Camden, for example, LGBTQ+, care leavers, and BAME young people.
- The added funding from the social prescribing grant has given us the creativity and flexibility to remove barriers for young people we support.
- The Hive premises is now available to us full time, so we will be able to offer daytime provisions like running a young parenting group, training programmes, therapeutic groups (of which we would like to run more), and more.
- We also hope to specialise in more targeted projects, that meet the needs and interests of our service users.
- We hope to focus on more outreach work, and to facilitate more of a satellite service to engage with young people where they are, for example, in schools, homeless shelters, and parks.
- We would like to continue to be a service that is open to learning.
- Finally, we would like to be a good example of co-production, keeping young people at the heart of The Hive in all our work.
“Staff ensure that I am comfortable, and they don’t put pressure on me. I’m heard and am taken seriously when it comes to speaking. I’m also offered support and resources in case I need help.”
– Service user