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. This year we celebrated our 25th anniversary. We aim to promote positive mental health for those aged 16 and over, living with severe and often enduring mental health problems, 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. 

During the financial year 2018/19 the average daily attendance was 79 and our average number of active members per month was 578. Find out how to become a member here.

We are an accredited Clubhouse. Find our latest Accreditation Report 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 £1.2M, of which 71% of income is commissioned statutory funding from Lambeth/NHS Clinical Commissioning Group, 23% from trust and grant fundraising sources and 6% from 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 are currently looking to introduce a new scale to measure our members’ wellbeing and look forward to sharing the results of this project.

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.