LEx Leaders

LEx Leaders Development

A development support programme that builds the abilities and confidence to develop and manage user-led community organisations.

The LEx Leaders Programme

Our LEx Leaders Programme aims to build the abilities and confidence of mental health lived experience (LEx) leaders and organisations to develop and effectively manage user-led community organisations and services.

Our two-year National Lottery funded programme came to an end in June 2023. More to come!  See the end-of-grant report here >

Why LEx Leaders, and why now?

Catalyst 4 Change believes that to successfully renew civil society it is imperative that we make access to services equal and that those services are culturally representative and responsive.

The LEx Leaders Development Programme will help to affect meaningful change by empowering and equipping grassroots African and Caribbean communities to provide high quality, culturally relevant, user-led mental health and wellbeing services and enterprises.

The LEx Leaders Living Toolkit

The LEx Leaders Development Programmes' bank of good governance resources in various essential topics is for lived experience leaders and their emerging organisations.

The Living Toolkit was co-developed with Catalyst 4 Change, in partnership with various local organisations and enterprises, including Birmingham Voluntary Services Council (BVSC), BlueSky Coaching, EW Accounting and Training Personified.

How to get involved

Our LEx Leaders Development Programme has three elements: 

1) To support emerging BME entrepreneurs and grassroots organisations who are working in the field of mental health, by incubating and/or supporting them over the life of the programme. This will help to create both new and innovative approaches to BME mental health support as well as providing role models from within the community.

2) Co-produce an online resources suite (our ‘living toolkit’) which will be freely available to all LEx Programme participants and Catalyst’s members. This toolkit will also form a series of training modules to be delivered to participants in 2022.


3) Work with the BME communities to build awareness, resilience and confidence to articulate their needs and become civic and community decision makers and future leaders.


To achieve these elements, we will include running a series of group workshops and one-to-one interventions with the programme participants on a variety of topics (e.g., legal structures, good governance, service planning and development, fundraising strategies/applications, marketing & promotion etc), which will build capacity, performance, knowledge, and resilience amongst the participating BME led mental health groups/organisations.

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The National Lottery Community Fund said;


"The programme builds on the Leaders with Lived Experience Pilot Programme and is part of a wider journey to share power with communities, improve perceptions of LEx and create parity between different types of knowledge and experience.


"The impetus for the programme, its shape and vision, came from witnessing the commitment, innovation and resilience of the pilot cohort, particularly in the early stages of the Covid crisis when mainstream organisations were retreating. This confirmed that LEx experience leadership needs to be at the forefront of strategies for the future of civil society."

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