The Ideas Fund - coming soon for mental wellbeing projects

The Ideas Fund is a new grants programme delivered by the British Science Association and funded by Wellcome that enables the UK public to think about, develop and test new ideas related to areas of mental wellbeing that are relevant to them. The Fund connects communities with research professionals to bring their ideas to life. The Fund will launch mid-January and run until October 2023. The first round of funding will be focused on four localities – more information on these will be available when the Fund is launched.

They are keen to support great, innovative ideas that focus on improving mental wellbeing. To do this, they want to help connect communities that want to tackle problems that matter to them with health research professionals and their work.

The projects that they will fund must either

• develop skills within a community to engage with mental wellbeing

or

• develop relationships between communities and researchers

Or both.

They may also help researchers develop their skills in engaging with communities around health research.

So get your thinking caps on and check back for when the scheme launches. It's important to note here that this scheme looks like it wants to support true partnerships, and in particular allow publics to identify ideas and be involved in bringing them to life, so not researcher-led initiatives that are done to particular groups.

More information about the Ideas Fund