“Imagine your Goals” – Improving Mental Health through Football

“Imagine your Goals” – Improving Mental Health through Football

Imagine Your Goals was a two year project to improve wellbeing through sport. Running from 2010-2012, it aimed to help people’s physical and mental health; increase the social inclusion of people with mental health problems; and tackle the stigma and discrimination people with mental health problems experience.

Sixteen Imagine Your Goals projects were delivered by community trusts and schemes affiliated to Premier League football clubs, and the Premier League and Sport Relief jointly funded the programme.

Time to Change, the anti-stigma and discrimination programme, managed Imagine Your Goals. Time to Change is England’s biggest programme to end the stigma and discrimination faced by people with mental health problems, and is run by the charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness. From 2007-2011 Time to Change was funded by £16m from the Big Lottery Fund and £4.5m from Comic Relief, and from October 2011 it has been funded by the Department of Health and Comic Relief.

The Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London provided evaluation of Imagine Your Goals, which focused on the impact of the physical activity and social contact. The evaluation looked at whether attending sessions improved the wellbeing of participants; if it increased their engagement with their local community and if it decreased stigma and discrimination. In addition to this, participants and staff completed evaluation forms (196 received in total), participants took part in five focus groups and projects submitted monitoring reports. This completed the picture of how projects were making a difference to participants and the overall success of Imagine Your Goals.