MindFull

According to MindFull, the site offers a brilliant new service for 11-17 year olds, providing support, information and advice about mental health and emotional wellbeing. They have the tools and tips to help children and young people to get better. They have lots of people that youngsters can talk to, and the best bit is that MindFull is safe. That safety is assured because they train young people in two days and then unleash them into their communities.
Like a lot of charities MindFull`s claims cannot be seen as realistic.

MindFull trains young people aged between 11-17 to become MindFull Mentors. Over one or two days, we give them skills and knowledge to improve their own mental health, and train them to mentor and support other young people around wellbeing issues. We call this social action - young people choosing to do something good and make a difference to the world - social action is at the heart of everything we do.

As if that strategy was not inadequate enough, they encourage vulnerable children to go online with their problems?  When they are in doubt, they offer this advice to young people:

If there's something you don't understand on MindFull, the best thing to do is to ask an adult you trust. Or you can talk to any of the MindFull Mentors or someone who works for MindFull when they're online. They're all here to help you Offline (if you are being mentored in your school) the adult might be a teacher looking after MindFull in your school, or perhaps a teacher working in Pastoral Care.

Why does Mindfull not direct vulnerable young people to first try to engage with a member of their family? After all, not all families are child abusers and not all people who work with charities are trustworthy. 

 

 

Having introduced themselves to children, the MindFull site encourages children to go straight into the chat room and start chatting. Deeper into the website there are warnings:

We collect information about you when you use the MindFull website: for example, when you first register, when you have mentoring or counselling or when you enter a competition. Website usage information is also collected via cookies....

MindFull does lots of research into mental health and emotional wellbeing. We use the MindFull website to ask questions to help us better understand the types of issues young people are facing and how they are affected. This means we can improve our ways of helping and supporting you. Your information is kept confidential and not shared with other organisations, unless we believe that you are in danger.

So this is a new online confidential service (with certain conditions) that does a lot of research which does seem a bit of a contradiction. Moreover, they have their connections and these range from MPs to celebrities, they say, and Hedge Funds Care is a founding funder.

 

It is interesting to see who sits on the Board of Directors at Hedge Funds Care. There are partners in global investment banking firms, hedge funds, and at the head is the managing director of Goldman Sachs.
MindFull is also part of the BB Group:

 

The BB Group have received backing from the Venture Philanthropy Foundation whose thing is to "facilitate growth and maximise social impact." They have also received support from the UK Cabinet Office:  http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/

Over the last 3 years, the Cabinet Office has continued to invest in the transition of the charity from a single programme to a group structure. Grants, loans and investments have allowed us to scale our impact, diversify our provision, re-structure our services, expand the reach and success of our social enterprises and seed-fund and invest in our technology build. Critically, when others paused the Cabinet Office investment allowed us to continue to develop our digital social action and volunteering model.

The BB Group also tell us that:

Through the DAPHNE III Fund the EU is funding the expansion of BeatBullying into 8 countries across Europe. Working in close partnership with excellent organisations on the ground in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Czech Republic and Romania we are rolling out the BeatBullying model. Over the next two years we aim together to reach over a million European young people.

So behind the MindFull website there are some very big players: banking globalists, the Cabinet Office, The European Union and others. They have big ambitions about how to sweep their ideas across charities and towards millions of children, particularly in those countries which are now in serious trouble due to austerity after the global banking fiascos.

MindFull is not an independent charity and it is not innocent.