Young people growing up in low-income urban neighbourhoods are facing a growing mental health challenge. Around one in five young people in the UK now experience a probable mental health disorder, and many also feel anxious about climate change, often called "climate stress". At the same time, households on low incomes are twice as likely to lack access to local green spaces. Traditional approaches to youth mental health often over look how community-led green spaces could help. This project addresses a critical community need at the intersection of urban youth deprivation, mental health inequalities, and local environmental exclusion in Leicester.
Leicester City Council’s Joint Strategic Needs Assessment (JSNA) and recent Children’s Health and Wellbeing Survey highlight significant emotional health inequalities across deprived inner-city wards, where up to 10%of young people report having no trusted adult to confide in (Leicester City Council, 2023a, 2023b). While 59%of young people report acute eco-anxiety (Hickman et al., 2021), a profound local knowledge gap remains regarding how 'climate stress' compounds these vulnerabilities in Leicester's most marginalised youth.
This PhD project will explore how taking part in community-led food-growing spaces can protect and support young people's mental wellbeing. It builds on a previous pilot which found that "trusted adults" are the main reason young people stay engaged. The candidate will work with Peace of Green CIC, whose allotment site (the Neighbourhood Nook) is a base for this work, to co-design a mentor training framework for frontline practitioners. The project will apply human resource management principles to develop a practical blue print for training, supporting and sustaining grassroots mentors.
The project will compare two contrasting Leicester communities: a historically white, working-class neighbourhood with very limited contact with nature, and a densely populated, ethnically diverse community. Over three years, the candidate will carry out fieldwork in community allotments and urban food-growing hubs. By looking at how young people and mentors interact in these different settings, the project will map which environmental, cultural and relational factors help young people's mental health. The research aims to give community organisations realistic, evidence-informed tools that reduce the local impact of youth climate stress.
This project has been co-created with and is supported by researchers from 冈本视频 and the University of Leicester, and partners at Peace of Green CIC. The successful candidate for this project will be enrolled at 冈本视频.
The project aims to:
- Investigate how socio-economically deprived and marginalised young people experience climate stress and nature detachment. Comparing engagement barriers across two distinct Leicester contexts (ethnically diverse Highfields vs. white working-class Stocking Farm) to establish an empirical baseline.
- Analyse the psychological mechanics of community-led food-growing spaces in mitigating co-anxiety, preserving wellbeing, and fostering climate agency among vulnerable youth.
- Map key "trusted adult" mentoring competencies and boundary-management skills to co-design an HRM-driven training framework that prevents volunteer burnout and upscales capacity in grassroots environmental CICs.
Full Supervisory Team
- Lead Academic Supervisor: Dr Tung Dao (冈本视频)
- Academic Co-Supervisor: Dr Ayham Jaaron (冈本视频)
- Academic Co-Supervisor: Dr Wolf Ellis (Loughborough University)
- Community Supervisor: Bruce Harrison (Leicester South Foodbank)
Estimated thesis submission: