The Contact Group is delighted to announce that, following a successful funding application, the Veterans’ Foundation will provide a further major grant in 2023 worth up to £200,000 for the continued facilitation of increased capacity and faster access to mental health treatment for veterans through a dedicated treatment fund aimed at addressing unmet demand.
During 2023, the funding will be disbursed to six established charitable providers of veterans’ mental health treatment, now including a Northern Ireland-based charity, all of whom are members of the Contact & Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Quality Network for Veterans Mental Health Services (QNVMHS). Contact will continue to provide coordination support for the distribution of funds, based on estimates of current and future demand and capacity, and will collate activity and outcomes data. The charity recipients of the new 2023 targeted funding are: Combat Stress, Help for Heroes, Icarus Charity, PTSD Resolution, Walking With The Wounded and Brooke House Health & Wellbeing Centre. The veterans to benefit from this funding may be new or returning service users with these charities who may otherwise not have been able to access treatment in a timely way.
David Shaw, CEO of the Veterans’ Foundation, said: “Occasionally we award repeating quarterly grants to organisations (subject to certain requirements) that meet particular needs of the armed forces community. I would like to highlight the £200K we awarded last year (and more to come this year) through the Contact Group and via the following organisations to help veterans with mental health challenges: WWTW, Combat Stress, Icarus, PTSD Resolution, Help for Heroes and Brooke House. Some users of this large grant enable rapid intervention for individuals in trouble, intervention that may have save lives. We continue to see this as an important area to fund and acknowledge that the Veterans’ Foundation’s funding dovetails well with the Government’s ‘Op Courage’ funding for mental heath.”
Contact is delighted that the Veterans’ Foundation has recognised the continuing demand and capacity issues affecting many veterans being able to access quality mental health treatment in a timely way and we are looking forward to working with VF and our treatment-providing charity partners to ensure that the continuation of this dedicated fund is appropriately targeted and effectively used over the coming year.
To support the Veterans’ Foundation in providing grants like this and many others, all of which fund the invaluable work of charities working to support the UK Armed Forces Community, please consider playing the Veterans’ Lottery for as little as £10 a month – details can be found at: https://www.veteransfoundation.org.uk/lottery/join/