Members of the Programmes, Finance, and Operations team headed over the water to join Lee Pennington, founder and Director of Open Door Charity at their new space: Joy.

At the Community Foundation for Merseyside, we have a long history with Open Door Charity, awarding them their first ever grant in 2012 and enabling them to begin their journey in changing how mental health support is approached. In the last 14 years they have received over £250,000 of funding from us to trial and continue delivering catered mental health wellbeing support for young people and ensure their staff are trained to the highest standard.

Open Door Charity provides a variety of mental health support options including peer support groups for generalised anxiety, eating disorders, and autism. They also host wellbeing hubs for looked after children and autistic adults, both in person and online.

With Joy they are aiming to bring together the different branches of mental health and social action, allowing different services to connect and attendees to benefit from a variety of activities. The building, which is full of bright colours and light, will house a variety of services, including the Open Door Charity themselves, whilst also hosting events and allowing smaller community organisations to hot desk and connect, encouraging collaboration. As we walked around the building you could see the vision, the warm yellows and saturated pinks brightening what was a typical rainy day in Birkenhead.

We are delighted to see how far Open Door Charity has come since its early days, and proud to say that we have been supporting them from day one. We cannot wait to see where Joy takes them and the changes they can make to the lives of thousands.