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The purpose of this paper is to explore what worked well in terms of peer involvement in a diverse network of community groups for people affected by mental health problems in Bath and North East Somerset (BANES), UK.

A participatory action inquiry approach engaged the network’s key stakeholders (group members, facilitators, and commissioners) in critical reflection on what supported successful groups.

Successful groups have six characteristics: mutual support, a positive shared identity, opportunities for taking on roles, negotiated ground rules, skilled facilitation, and a conducive physical environment. Additionally, each group achieved a balance between the following areas of tension: needing ground rules but wanting to avoid bureaucracy, needing internal structure whilst also committing to group activities, balancing leadership with accountability, wanting peer leadership whilst acknowledging the burden of this responsibility, and lobbying for change in mental health services whilst acknowledging the need for support from them.

The evaluation shows a group’s success is about adaptability and group facilitation is the art of navigating a course through these competing demands above. These insights have informed plans for a practical guide for developing peer led groups and for training of peer leaders in BANES.

This evaluation focuses on self-efficacy. It draws on group members’ own perceptions of what worked best for them to provide transferable learning about how peer led support groups might develop more generally. It can thus inform the growth of a comparatively new kind of community-based support for people with mental health problems and for their carers.

This paper reports on action research which explored assertive outreach service users’ experiences of community participation and then fed this learning into a multi‐agency forum – where it was used in joint‐planning between mental health services and community partners, aiming to maximise social inclusion locally.

Action research methodology was chosen to examine the forum's work because it brings together different perspectives to reveal an issue in its entirety and effect change in practice. Service users’ experiences were explored using semi‐structured qualitative interviews.

Engagement in mainstream community‐based activities re‐connected service users with cherished life roles and developed feelings of self‐efficacy, belonging, and wellbeing. Effective inter‐sectoral working in the forum was based on a shared agenda and collective action planning.

Whilst every effort was made to ensure an authentic service user voice informed service development, it is unfortunate – in action research terms – that no service user interviewees were able to participate directly in the work of the forum. Community development work can build on micro‐level, person‐centred mental health care and extend outwards to collective community activity, aiming to harness social capital.

Assertive outreach – harnessing mainstream occupations through care‐planning – achieved outcomes that institutional rehab could not, and did so with a minimum of stigmatisation.

This inquiry highlights that social inclusion is the responsibility of the community as a whole.

This inquiry appreciated service users as evaluators of the services they used and aimed to bring that knowledge to bear on service development.

The purpose of this paper is to report on an action inquiry (AI) evaluation of the Natureways project, a time-limited collaboration between an NHS Trust Vocational Service and a voluntary sector horticulture-based community interest company (CIC).

Natureways produced positive employment outcomes and an AI process – based on co-operative inquiry with trainees, staff, and managers – explored how these had been achieved.

Natureways’ efficacy was based on features of the setting (its supportiveness, rural location, and workplace authenticity), on its embeddedness (within local care-planning pathways, the horticultural industry, and the local community), and on effective intersectoral working. The inquiry also generated actionable learning about creative leadership and adaptability in the changing landscape of service provision, about the benefits of the CIC's small scale and business ethos, about the links between trainees’ employability, social inclusion and recovery, about horticulture as a training medium, and about the role of AI in service development.

The inquiry highlights how an intersectoral CIC can be an effective model for vocational rehabilitation.

Community-embeddeness is an asset for mental health-orientated CICs, facilitating social inclusion and recovery. Social and therapeutic horticulture settings are seen to be conducive to this.

This case study suggests that AI methodology is not only well-suited to many practitioners’ skill sets, but its participatory ethos and focus on experiential knowledge makes it suitable for bringing a service user voice to bear on service development.

The purpose of this paper is to explore features of successful peer supported community support groups hosted by St Mungo’s and partners.

Literature review and theme construction.

Overall the review confirmed existing findings that successful support groups foster mutually supportive, reciprocal relationships capable of inspiring hope among group members. This paper will concentrate on findings that co-production was indicative of successful groups in terms of shared aims, negotiated agendas, clear communication, and engagement with the wider community.

A group’s success was seen in terms of growth in members’ self-esteem, empowerment, and optimism, which this paper proposes could become part of a conceptual framework of a learning organisational culture.

Developing understanding of a rapidly growing phenomenon in community-based mental health care and presenting this in terms of a particular organisational culture.

This chapter traces the history of widening participation (WP) policy from 1992 to 2021, as seen largely from the point of view of a practitioner involved in policy enactment. After a brief overview of the history of widening access to higher education (HE), with its long tradition of outreach to adults, this chapter focuses on the significant shift to WP among young people in 1992. Following attempts to specify the problem and to provide the available evidence about it, a range of initiatives was introduced, designed to test appropriate interventions. This chapter identifies three broad strands of intervention – changes in the funding method, the requirement for institutions to produce WP strategies, and the development of collaborative programmes, all underpinned by a programme of research. Though the balance of these three strands has varied ever since, all have always been present. Underpinning all this intervention was a general assumption, again differentially emphasised, that widening access and participation to HE, though an ambition for the whole sector, would be an activity separate from and subordinate to the existing missions and ‘business’ of institutions and accepting the existing market hierarchy. From 2010 onwards, there was a sharper policy shift, which sought to make the existing market both a market in entry qualifications and a genuine financial market in tuition fees, with students seen as consumers, and a determination to ensure value for money for all and from all institutions. In spite of this, the three strands of intervention remained.

Globalisation is generally defined as the “denationalisation of clusters of political, economic, and social activities” that destabilize the ability of the sovereign State to control activities on its territory, due to the rising need to find solutions for universal problems, like the pollution of the environment, on an international level. Globalisation is a complex, forceful legal and social process that take place within an integrated whole with out regard to geographical boundaries. Globalisation thus differs from international activities, which arise between and among States, and it differs from multinational activities that occur in more than one nation‐State. This does not mean that countries are not involved in the sociolegal dynamics that those transboundary process trigger. In a sense, the movements triggered by global processes promote greater economic interdependence among countries. Globalisation can be traced back to the depression preceding World War II and globalisation at that time included spreading of the capitalist economic system as a means of getting access to extended markets. The first step was to create sufficient export surplus to maintain full employment in the capitalist world and secondly establishing a globalized economy where the planet would be united in peace and wealth. The idea of interdependence among quite separate and distinct countries is a very important part of talks on globalisation and a significant side of today’s global political economy.