Mental Health Northants Collaboration (MHNC) is rolling out a fresh wave of free Inclusive Volunteering Training sessions across the county, with new dates now available through to December 2026. The workshops form part of the Volunteers for Health Northants project and aim to help community groups and charities better support volunteers living with mental ill-health, learning disabilities, or neurodivergence.
Each session is co-designed to challenge unconscious biases about who can and cannot volunteer while shining a light on hidden barriers that often go unnoticed. Attendees leave with practical tools and resources to make their volunteering opportunities genuinely accessible. Early feedback has been emphatic: 82 per cent of participants have already committed to making changes within their organisation to make volunteering more inclusive, and every single person surveyed said they would recommend the training to others.
The programme has grown steadily since the first Volunteers for Health Conference in 2025, which sparked working groups and test-and-learn projects that shaped today’s offer. Delivered in webinars, online classrooms, and face-to-face workshops, upcoming sessions will take place at Teamwork Trust, Riverside Resource Centre, Waterside Connect, and Rushden Mind. The initiative sits inside a wider system-wide drive to embed volunteering at the heart of health and care in Northamptonshire, funded by NHS England, NHS Charities Together, and CW+, and led by Voluntary Impact Northamptonshire. It runs until June 2027, with a full impact evaluation due the same year.
MHNC itself is a coalition of voluntary sector charities working together to deliver integrated, person-centred mental health services across the county. Organisations interested in booking a place can find the full schedule on the MHNC Eventbrite page.
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