Hear Us is a registered charity and is Croydon’s Mental Health Service User Group. We act as a coordinating body to facilitate, and ensure service users’ involvement in, the planning, delivery and monitoring of mental health services in Croydon. We help to improve the quality of the services commissioned and delivered in Croydon through representing the needs of our service users to service providers. 

Our main objectives are:

1. To relieve the needs of people living in the London Borough of Croydon and surrounding areas who have mental health problems by provision of services and advice

2. To advance education about mental health for the public benefit in the London borough of Croydon and surrounding areas with the object of creating awareness and reducing the stigma attached to mental health. 

Hear Us is entirely service user led with all of our trustees, staff and volunteers having lived experience of mental health issues. We have been in existence since 2001 originally as a social enterprise and became a charity in 2009. We provide peer support services to people with severe and enduring mental health conditions, primarily through our welfare benefit surgeries and Linkworking projects. We support people with their welfare benefit claims and also support people to access food banks and discretionary grants. Our Linkworking project enables people in crisis to raise issues with service providers (particularly South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust) so that the care and treatment they receive meets their needs.

As well as placing the charity on a more sustainable financial footing, we are now looking to expand our activities to campaign for change and increase informed awareness of mental health within the community based on our experiences and knowledge of mental health service provision.