How whole families receive support for children on the edge of care

Project: My Time

Purpose: To provide holistic mental health services to individuals and families who may be under-served by mainstream provision

Funding: My Time costs around £800,000 a year to run. It gets about 60 per cent of its income from public sector contracts, 30 per cent from long-term grants from organisations such as the Big Lottery Fund and trusts, and 10 per cent from direct work for the police and others

Background: In the late 1980s, Michael Lilley found himself a single father of three due to his then partner's mental health problems. As a carer and father he felt shut out of adult services. "Children's services supported me and the children while adult services supported my wife," he says. "There was no sense of a continuum, which meant that for a long time the children were brought up without contact with mum." This, together with experience of working with the asylum seeker and refugee community in Birmingham, prompted Lilley to seek a new approach to mental health provision. Having trained as a psychologist, in 2002 he formed the groundbreaking social enterprise My Time, which has since grown to take on 38 staff and 22 volunteers working with 1,500 service users each year.