Opening a door to a new way of doing politics and public service

Lee Pennington, founder and director of Open Door, a grassroots organisation focused on supporting young adults mental health, talks to UCL Policy Lab’s James Baggaley about the transformative impact of community-led services and the role the third sector can play in improving public services.

Lee Pennington is both rightly proud and quietly confident as he speaks to me about the future of his Birkenhead community. I’d come to speak to him about Open Door, the community-based youth mental health organisation he founded in 2011. 

Just hours earlier I’d been speaking to members of the public about the cost of living. Pensive and anxious, they shared their concerns for the future, including their belief that politics as usual might not help change their circumstances. Sat with Lee, however, I was hearing a very different vision of what politics and public service could be.

How did Open Door come about? And what does it aim to do?  

Open Door was established in November 2011. I had no background in mental health or anything like that. I was working as a milkman with my dad and doing removals. Suicide had touched people close to me and I had a bout of anxiety myself. I wanted to prevent what was happening around me happening to others, so I decided to design a service that could support people like me or my mates - where ordinary twenty-somethings could walk in and it feels as though they can talk as freely about the festivals you’re planning to go to as much as the therapeutic intervention you’re doing.

The original idea was to throw together the worlds of mental health, counselling and therapies, social action and volunteering and building lived experience into a positive outcome in the lives of others, and using culture, music and art as the conduit for the mental health support, and see what comes out the other side. Fast forward eleven years and we’re still the same, just on a much more significant and exciting scale. We’ve reached the stage where we are a key player regionally in the mental health conversation, but we’ve also broadened what we do to work with local authorities and NHS trusts regionally to unpick problems they might have and come up with an Open Door-ified response.

It’s noticeable that you don’t use the usual conventional language of mental health, instead you focus on the everyday lives of those who use your services, namely, young people. How important is it that you reflect their lived experience? 

Perceptions of mental health often provide a barrier to support. So, even if someone is depressed or anxious, it’s rare to hear people say that they could do with, or love the idea of, a bit of counselling. Even though the world has changed drastically for mental health awareness in the last decade, it’s still normal for people to be disengaged with what they might need. If we do a gig, a festival, an art exhibition, any event, we sneak the mental health stuff in. Everyone who comes into the Bloom building asks what we do here, and we talk about the events we do, but during the week, we offer counselling services, and people leave thinking, “I know where I need to go when I need it”. We want to change perceptions about where mental health support lives, where those conversations live, and support people in a way where they don’t feel as though they have submitted themselves to some sort of stigmatised process.

Open Door’s approach has been transformative for the young people who use your services. And you're now working with NHS trusts and local authorities. How do they respond to your approach? One that’s perhaps more grounded in the community and organic?

I’m pleased to say the reception has been universally positive.  It remains unique in this area, but it is common sense to empower young people to help other young people take those negative life experiences and turn them into a positive outcome for both. By empowering people in the communities where you’re working, you can avoid waiting lists, because people love the opportunity to support their neighbours. We know people want to get involved, so let’s share the good news!

You run a lot of peer to peer services. Meaning your helping young people support one another, as well as seek help themselves. It does feel as if Open Door is building a deeper sense of community and belonging than a traditional public service. Do you think there are wider benefits to your approach? 

For the mentor in a peer-to-peer relationship, it’s just as emotionally rewarding as for the mentee, as the vast majority of mentors have been in that position themselves. It’s also a professionally rewarding process - we have a number of mentors currently studying related courses, training to become a mental health nurse or work in social care, so there’s a vocational dynamic away from the emotional rewards that is paramount to what we’re doing here. Sitting and having a coffee or something, talking about books they’re reading, music they’re listening to - “I’m not going mad, I’m not the only person” - the mentor can help you overcome the feeling of being defeated. You learn about CBT, mindfulness, the therapeutic processes at the heart of the mentoring process, but you can’t undermine the power of being introduced to these ideas by somebody with similar life experiences.

We’ve been asking people in Liverpool - what could the government do to enable or support the work of Open Door and other organisations like it?

Generally, we’ve been able to develop whilst relying on my willingness to go out and knock on the doors of NHS commissioners and think outside the box - and it’s much too hard. When you see there has been billions allocated to the NHS for mental health, the unfortunate truth is that it is often pumped into supporting old ways that aren’t always working. We need commissioners to trust the third sector at the same level at which they value them - and that needs to be built into policy. The rate of third sector organisation survival after three years is abysmal - much lower than it should be, so we need to put money into exciting and bespoke ways of supporting people’s mental health that weren’t there ten years ago.

Finally you’re opening up a brand new centre of excellence here in Birkenhead. Can you tell me about this? And what do you aim to achieve? 

Joy is an open door charity project, and a multi-million pound capital build to take an ex-council building and revitalise and rebuild it to create alongside partners from each of the NHS trusts in Wirral to create a National Centre of Excellence for mental health and wellbeing, using the arts and social action - a game changer for how we do mental health. And I’m so proud we're doing it here in Birkenhead. It’s part of a bigger story of rejuvenation for a community that’s often been overlooked. I guess we’re playing our part in trying to level up. 

It starts to rain as we finish up at the Bloom Building, a former industrial site that now plays host to Open Door. We bundle into the back of Lee’s car as he starts to tell us about the local area, its history and his hopes for the future. 

We drive along the road, past the 12th century Birkenhead Priory, past the shipyards that once employed thousands, and onto the granite lined streets of Hamilton Square, designed, as Lee points out, by James Gillespie Graham, the man behind much of Edinburgh's grandest homes. 

And finally to the old council building that will play host to Joy, Open Door’s latest initiative to support mental health across the UK, a space made possible through the passionate hard work of Lee, the Open Door team and the community here in Birkenhead. 

As we shuttle under the Mersey to once again interview people about the cost of living, I can’t help but think that if we are to come through the crisis, if we are to build something better, to level up, then we’d do well to listen to Lee, and the thousands of others like him in communities across the UK. They have a lot to teach us. If we’re willing to listen.