The Birmingham Communities programme has taught us things we could not have learned any other way. About what genuine community engagement looks like. About what changes when a community owns a wellbeing programme. And about what happens to the people who become Mental Health Ambassadors within it.
How it started
The Birmingham Communities programme did not begin with a fully formed plan. It began with a question put to residents: what would a mental health programme need to look like to work here?
The answers were specific and locally rooted in a way that no external assessment could have produced. They reflected the languages spoken in different parts of the community, the cultural attitudes towards mental health that shaped who would and would not engage, the practical constraints of people’s lives that determined when and where a programme could realistically run.
Building from those answers took time. There were sessions that needed to be rethought, formats that did not work as expected, assumptions on our side that residents gently but clearly challenged. The process was uncomfortable in places. It was also, consistently, instructive.
What changed about the programme
The Brain Smart framework remained constant. The understanding of threat mode and smart mode, the science of how the brain responds to threat, the practical skills for shifting between the two: these do not need to be different in Birmingham than anywhere else because they describe how the human brain works.
What changed was how the programme was delivered, by whom, in what language, in what setting, at what time, with what cultural context built around it. These details are not superficial. They are often the difference between a programme that people attend and one they own.
The Birmingham programme is now delivered by people from within the community. That was not the starting point. It was something that developed as residents who had been through Brain Smart chose to go further and become Mental Health Ambassadors. The programme belongs to the community in a way it did not when we arrived.
What the Mental Health Ambassadors do
The Ambassadors who have emerged from the Birmingham Communities programme are not people who would have been predicted to end up in peer support roles. They are people who encountered Brain Smart because it was available in their community, who found something in it that was genuinely useful, and who decided they wanted to offer that to others.
In practice, they show up in the spaces where people already are. Talking groups, community events, informal gatherings. They are not running clinical sessions. They are being present, being willing to listen, being known as someone it is okay to talk to. That is the role. And in communities where formal mental health provision is often distant or inaccessible, that role matters enormously.
What the activities tell us
The meaningful activities that run alongside Brain Smart in Birmingham, the talking groups, the poetry competitions, the creative projects, reflect something important about what genuine community wellbeing looks like.
It is not just the transmission of information about mental health. It is the creation of conditions in which people feel connected, purposeful and valued. Connection is one of the strongest protective factors for mental health that the evidence identifies. The activities are not incidental to the programme. They are part of what the programme is.
What we would do differently
We would start slower. The instinct when beginning community work is to move towards delivery as quickly as possible. The Birmingham experience taught us that the time spent building genuine relationships and understanding before anything formal begins is not time lost. It is the foundation everything else rests on.
We would also be more explicit earlier about what co-production actually requires from both sides. It requires residents to invest time and knowledge. It requires us to listen and change what we had planned. Making that mutual commitment explicit from the start reduces the friction that comes when either side finds the process more demanding than expected.