The Children and Young People's Mental Health Coalition (CYPMHC) unites a broad membership of organisations to campaign collectively for better children's mental health. Its work spans whole-school approaches to mental health and wellbeing, Mental Health Act reform, the relationship between poverty and children's mental health, and direct engagement with government and parliament. In 2025, the Coalition reached its fifteenth year, an occasion marked with a dedicated Task and Finish Group to reflect on what had been built and to contribute to a meaningful milestone moment for the organisation.
A coalition's strength is its membership. CYPMHC exists because individual organisations campaigning separately are less effective than a unified voice. After fifteen years, the question is not just what has been achieved, but how the coalition's collective capacity can be directed most effectively at what remains to be done.
My Involvement
I was involved in helping to organise the CYPMHC 15th birthday Task and Finish Group, contributing to the coordination and logistics of a group convened to mark the Coalition's fifteenth anniversary and to take stock of its work and priorities going forward. The Task and Finish Group format is typical of how coalitions address time-bound objectives: a focused group with a specific remit, a defined endpoint, and a clear output. For a coalition that had spent fifteen years building a unified campaigning voice, the milestone was an occasion to reflect on what that voice had achieved and where it needed to be directed next.