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  4. Kailo: understanding and addressing the root causes of young people’s mental health

Kailo: understanding and addressing the root causes of young people’s mental health

With mental health concerns among the young on the rise, we are leading the Kailo programme in Newham to understand root causes of poor adolescent mental health, and support young people and communities to work alongside system leads to design place-based responses.

Mental health problems among young people have increased in recent years, and we know that for many, impacts continue throughout the life course. Kailo is a five-year programme of research and design that works with local communities, young people and public service partnerships to understand and address contextually relevant social determinants of young people’s mental health.  

The programme is initially operating in two ‘Pioneer Places’ – North Devon and Newham, East London. We are leading the work in Newham. 

This work is part of our adolescent mental health programme, one of our priority areas identified in our five-year strategy.

Using Kailo to address young people’s mental health 

Kailo has three key phases:  

  1. Early Discovery 
  1. Deeper Discovery & Co-design  
  2. Implementation & Adaptation.

The project is currently in the Deeper Discovery & Co-design phase, which will run until March 2024. By the end of the Deeper Discovery phase, we aim to have achieved the following: 

  1. Community-led: Built capacity, and identified resources, within local communities, to support community members to have helped shape the co-design phase and contributed to the beginning of transferring ownership (and leadership) from Kailo to the community. 
  1. Understood local experience: Developed a better, and more nuanced understanding of how the opportunity areas are defined and experienced in, and by, young people and the wider local communities. 
  1. Built on existing evidence: Incorporated academic evidence and existing data to build the knowledge around opportunity areas. 
  1. Identified where impactful change can occur: Understood how the opportunity areas identified in the Early Discovery phase are situated in the wider system and identified leverage points in which impactful change can occur. This included understanding the underlying drivers for the identified opportunity areas, including barriers and enablers.  

Using this far deeper understanding of need and opportunity that we will have collectively built will then enable us to work with local community members as part of the final stage of the Kailo programme to develop complexity-informed strategies to improve outcomes for young people’s mental health and well-being at the local level.

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