NCEL CAMHS Small Grants Programme to Address Health Inequalities

Working with North Central and East London CAMHS Provider Collaborative (NCEL), in March we distributed £1.5m of funding to 51 service providers delivering community-based mental health support for children and young people across 13 boroughs.

An innovative procurement approach generated 407 expressions of interest and 307 applications with over £10.8m total funds requested – around £1m more than in each of the previous two years, demonstrating demand in the sector.

Empowering communities and tackling inequality, we formed a service-user led evaluation/decision-making panel to assess all applications.

With a team of 12 – just one running our finance department – we have hit all necessary deadlines, even turning round signed and returned contracts and invoices within a 1-2 week window. This is thanks to our dedicated team, who go above and beyond every day – supporting each other and the communities we work with.

All details fall within the relevant time period, though contracts run from April to March. Having only recently distributed 2025 funds, it is too early for feedback on results, so we are referencing information from last year’s project (which does fall within the requested timeline). In total the NCEL contracts has seen us distribute £4.5m to date.