OTR : Our Impact
Our story in 2018-19
Welcome to our Impact Report website, where we’re sharing our highlights, stats and learnings from 2018-19. This was a transformative year for OTR – we have a new CEO, Karen, and you can hear some words from her on the video on this site.
We successfully trialled new referral routes – our Hubs, and the ‘sign-up’ function on our website – which more than ever allow young people to have a choice and a voice in the way they access OTR. It’s also our way of trying to influence how we think young people could and should access mental health information and support on a broader scale.
This change helped us reach more young people than ever before, and we were able to open up a number of new, exciting projects for young people across Bristol and South Gloucestershire.
Read on to find out more about what we’ve been up to!
“Everyone seems really kind and willing to help. There’s a good variety of programs”
Feedback from a young person
This year, we’ve evolved our existing offer to be as diverse and community-focused as possible, while also establishing new projects based on feedback and need from young people.
For example, our LGBTQ+ project Freedom has gone from strength to strength – scaling to become a regular social and support hub for over 50 young people each week. We are excited to introduce plans to embed Freedom and LGBTQ+ work into schools and the wider community in the coming months.
This year we also launched Corner Man, Nature Works and Shameless (which you can read about below); new service offers that look at sport, horticulture and body image and their relation to wellbeing in young people. In developing services this way, we are able to offer services that consider environmental and social factors of wellbeing, and not only ones that are transactional in nature. Young people have choice in the services with which they engage and the offer of one-to-one and structured group work remains one of these, but no longer the only one.
These services sit alongside our well-established one-to-one offer; counselling and other forms of one-to-one therapy remain a popular offer at OTR but we’re shifting away from that being the default choice.
Stat Attack
Our stats are telling us some really interesting stuff. Our headline figure is fantastic – we’ve reached almost 18,000 young people this year across our range of services, more than ever before. Our gender split shows us we need to continue working hard to engage young men at OTR.
Across our 11-25 age range, 76% of young people we supported were 11-18, while 24% were 19-25. Finally, in this year, 60% of the young people we see were white; while 40% were either Asian/Asian British, Black/Black British, mixed race, or not stated. Against the wider demographic stats for Bristol/South Glos, we know we’re doing well to work in a diverse way (for instance – OTR seeing 60% white young people compares to a wider city demographic of 84%). Our projects such as Zazi and Corner Man demonstrate how we are working hard to continue to engage BAME young people.
Here are some numbers in more detail 👇
Gender split
Age
Ethnicity
13, 14 & 15 year olds
Most common age demographic
“This place does brilliant work which is very much needed – and should be integrated into mainstream education!”
The money Breakdown
Income : £1,487,952
Income Breakdown
Expenditure : £1,487,604
Expenditure Breakdown
“OTR have been fantastic for my daughter. She has a safe and caring place to come and her confidence has grown. She loves OTR – on behalf of my daughter, thank you”
Feedback from a parent
Stories of our work
STORY: A NEW OTR PROJECT
SHAMELESS
Body image group
We heard from young people that they wanted us to provide a space to find information and support around body image. Working alongside a focus group of young people, we designed ‘Shameless’, a group exploring why we’ve grown to feel ashamed of our bodies, where expectations of how we should look come from, and how to fight back against these messages.
“I loved how positive it was, it made me feel confident in myself and I felt heard and listened to 
“
Check out this video explaining more:
Diffusion
In 2018-19 we launched a brand new initiative called ‘Diffusion‘ – a training and consultancy arm of OTR, allowing us to share our 50+ years of experience and knowledge, and bring in unrestricted funding for us to re-invest in new and creative ways. With our history of delivering mental health information and support, OTR is strongly positioned to pass on information and tangible skills for anyone interested in, or working with, young people’s wellbeing. In fact – the training and consultancy on offer from Diffusion is applicable across a wide range of disciplines, and we’ve experienced early success in delivering workshops and sessions in corporate environments. We are still developing the one-day training sessions into 2019-20 and hope to attract professionals from in and around Bristol/South Glos to learn more about wellbeing tips, tricks and strategies.
FUTURE PLANS AND OPPORTUNITIES
It’s really important for us to be transparent about areas of work we’re looking to improve, and learnings that we plan to take forward into 2019-20.
A big learning curve is that we can’t, nor do we need to, be everything to everyone. Whilst we are proud of our broad offer, we are increasingly looking to partner with other agencies and organisations who can provide more specialist and targeted work.
For instance, our project Corner Man was born out of a collaboration with Empire Fighting Chance, a local boxing gym. By embedding a worker into their setting, we are reaching young people where they already feel comfortable – rather than asking them to come to us.
We’re fortunate to be based in an area where there’s lots going on for young for people, and a vast array of high-quality services focusing on emotional wellbeing. The type of formal partnerships we’re working on help to bridge the gap between OTR and other agencies in the community, and this allows us to broaden our reach, evolve our offer and deliver the most appropriate and quality work for young people.
We have previously attempted to engage young people in care with bespoke service offers and found uptake to be slow, so instead we will shape our model to connect with professionals who already have those relationships, such as social workers.
Another challenge, and one that has presented itself for a number of years, is engaging young men in our work. We have launched a ‘men’s network group’ which is showing early promise – again collaborating with other agencies who support young men.
“Mind Aid has helped with making everyday life a little bit easier and has taught me helpful tips to prevent anything getting out of hand.“
Feedback from a young person