NSUN is a network of grassroots, user-led community groups and people who have lived experience of mental ill-health, distress, or trauma. We connect, support, and amplify the voices and work of the 5,000+ individuals and user-led groups that make up our membership. As the only user-led national mental health charity, all of our staff members and trustees have lived experience, and our work is rooted in our key value of solidarity.
We work to redistribute power and resource in mental health. We do this by:
- Building, amplifying and distributing the knowledge that is held by people with lived experience
- Creating collaborative spaces with members and partners to build momentum and sustainability for the work
- Building an alternative approach to mental health policy work
- Working with funders and acting as a microfunder to redistribute resources to grassroots user-led groups, as well as working to build capacity and sustainability in other, non-material ways
We bring to the mental health sector an authentic focus on lived experience and a commitment to social justice. We sit in a unique place, between the grassroots and the mainstream, and at the intersection of health, disability, and human rights, with a renewed focus on racial and migrant justice.
This page sets out more detail about what we do and how we work. You may also be interested in reading about our history and the language we use, and our mission, vision, and values.
Working to redistribute power and resource in mental health
In 2022, NSUN produced a Theory of Change to clarify our strategic direction, thinking critically about our place in a shifting landscape. The concepts of ‘lived experience’ and ‘co-production’, championed by NSUN since our launch in 2007 and the survivor/user movement as a whole for decades, are climbing to the top of many agendas. The ‘lived experience leadership’ field is growing. However, user-led organisations like NSUN and our grassroots group members remain outliers. In policy, research and service settings, lived experience is often tokenised, co-opted, and not truly heard.
We want to continuously reflect on our role within the mental health ecosystem and think about who we are serving by attempting to create policy change within the limitations of current structures. This is why our focus is on redistributing power and resource in mental health: we want to fight for more than just power-sharing, enabling people with lived experience and grassroots user-led groups to create and lead change, not just take part it in.
Our work is grounded in our capacity-building role for grassroots community groups. Many don’t explicitly describe themselves as user-led, or as primarily mental health-focussed. They often see their experiences of mental distress and trauma connected to other forms of marginalisation and oppression. Their centre of gravity is their own self-defined community and its needs. They are often small, informal, and volunteer-led, and their needs as organisations are rarely met. Traditional funding structures are exclusionary towards these groups, keeping them precarious. We want to make the case for the often-invisible labour of grassroots groups to be valued, understood, and funded.
Themes of NSUN’s work
- Knowledge: we want to build, amplify and distribute the knowledge that is held by people with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress and trauma
- Collaboration: we want to create collaborative spaces with members and partners through coalitions and networks to build momentum and sustainability for the work. We hope to build nurturing conditions within mental health work that prioritise care
- Voice: we want to build an alternative approach to mental health policy work, challenging traditional silos and hierarchies of evidence. This comes at a time where the external environment is one of hostile and unjust structures, systems and legislation
- Resourcing: we want to work with funders, and act as a microfunder to redistribute resources to grassroots user-led groups and establish better practice so that their work is sustained and valued
Long-term hopes
- For the plurality of lived experiences to be centred in the mental health space and acknowledged as legitimate knowledge
- For collective power to be built, sustained and exercised by grassroots groups
- For re-imagined mental health policy structures
- For the redistribution of power and resource in mental health
Guiding ethos
- Centering lived experience in its plurality, acknowledging and prioritising lived experience as a site of knowledge
- Working with a critical understanding of mental ill-health, distress, trauma, and madness, prioritising self-determination and choice in mental health care
- Committing to transformative justice and structural/political changes that transform the material conditions of people’s lives
- Not positioning ourselves as a single-issue organisation: our work must be intersectional, centering social justice and freedom from oppression, marginalisation, and state harm
- Having open ways of working together: being rooted in collaboration, encouraging generosity, care and uncertainty in our ways of working
What we don’t do
There are many things we are not (for example, we are not a service provider, or an educational, awareness-raising charity), but the following relates to work in the policy and influencing space.
A seat at the policy table comes at a cost. Too often, we are asked to be or represent “the voice” of all survivors and service users in decision-making settings, when there is no such thing as one survivor and service user voice. We are not one voice: we are a network of many. We do not have (nor do we seek) the authority to speak on behalf of anyone.
We recognise that our participation in certain processes can inadvertently legitimise harmful work. We can end up not being heard, ticking someone else’s co-production box, and perpetuating the status quo. We hope to model different ways of working, and reject harmful traditional policy structures. We created a decision-making matrix to help us decide which work we should be taking on. Some of the questions we are asking ourselves when considering new pieces of work include:
- Is the work ethical?
- Is there scope to meaningfully influence as part of this work or effect change for our members?
- Where the work involves sharing or collecting people’s experiences with significant emotional or other investment, is the likelihood of people’s lived experience being heard proportionate?
- Is another organisation better placed to do this work?
We want our approach to policy work to be critical, political and rights-based. We centre social justice, anti-oppression, and the social determinants of distress, focussing on issues such as state violence and harm.
Join us
NSUN membership is free and open to individuals with lived experience of mental ill-health, distress, or trauma as well as user-led groups. You can also sign up as an NSUN supporter.
Explore our work
To find out what all of this looks like in practice, you might want to read our latest news or have a look at some of the projects we work on, including our grant programmes for user-led groups, read about our policy and campaigns work or catch up on our policy briefings and articles, explore the lived experience-led research we have published, or read our some of our member blogs.
You can also read the following staff blogs:
– ‘How we make decisions’
– ‘Resourcing user-led work’
– ‘Policy at NSUN: Where do we stand, where might we go?’