Mosaic Clubhouse is an award-winning charity in Brixton providing services to the Lambeth community and surrounding boroughs. It has been funded by Lambeth Council and the NHS Lambeth since it was founded in 1994. We aim to promote positive mental health for those aged 16 and over, living with severe and often enduring mental health conditions, enabling individuals to regain the confidence and skills necessary to lead productive and satisfying lives.
The two central tenets of Mosaic are the concept of membership of the Clubhouse Community and working side by side with staff to co-deliver clubhouse activities as a key means of regaining confidence and self-esteem. Members work on reception, run our café, maintain our gardens, support our administration and finance activities and deliver workshops for the benefit of their peers. Members are the key stakeholders within our organisation and participate in all our work, decision-making and governance opportunities. Although the Clubhouse has paid support staff, services are deliberately understaffed, as a means of ensuring that everything is delivered in a partnership between members and staff.
Find out how to become a member here. Download posters about Mosaic Clubhouse, the Evening Sanctuary and the Information Hub here.
We are an accredited Clubhouse. Find our latest Accreditation Report here .
Read our 2021 report, The Community Stayed Open here. Find details of awards, publications, press, research and our Annual Reports here.
Who funds it and how much does it cost?
Mosaic has an annual turnover of £1.1M, of which approximately 70% of income is commissioned statutory funding from Lambeth/NHS Clinical Commissioning Group, and the remainder from trust and grant fundraising sources and other activities and donations.
What is the evidence that it works?
The Clubhouse model is based on the idea that when people volunteer with peers in a safe and supportive space, mental health and wellbeing improves. Established initially in the USA in the 1940s by a group of people leaving hospital, there are now more than 300 Clubhouses across 34 nations working to common standards and benefitting over 100,000 people per year.
At Mosaic we are keen to measure our impact on our members’ lives. We have always had a wealth of testimonials from members that talk about the positive impact being a member at Mosaic has had on them. In 2015 we developed our Theory of Change with New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) .
With this as a foundation we started trying to measure our impact with our ‘personal wellbeing quizzes,’ (PWQs) that combined 5 measuring scales, in January 2016. However quickly we started getting feedback that the forms were too long and the language used was too dense. The first analysis of our data showed some positive trends in members’ wellbeing, but the second in 2019 did not. We believe that this was because the PWQs were too long and difficult to fill out.
We started using the short Warwick Edinburgh scale in March 2020 to measure members' well being when they join Mosaic and for the first year they are a member.
What are plans and/potential for replication?
The varied size and location of Clubhouses across the world, both urban and rural and within a range of cultural settings, demonstrate transferability as an effective model of human interaction and recovery. As the model embeds co-production in its daily activity, it is assertive, inclusive and co-operative by design. Clubhouse International provides guidance on setting up a new Clubhouse . Mosaic Clubhouse, an accredited training base, is now offering to assist groups in the UK who are interested in establishing new start-ups .