About Us - Many Hands Project

Be Well

Get early-stage mental health and wellbeing support if you are studying with one of our 7 partner institutions and are a mature student, or a Black, Asian or minority ethnic student, or studying creative subjects

Peer-to-mentoring

Get connected safely and discreetly to someone who understands you. Choose from our growing pool of trained Mentors across the UK, using our digital mentoring platform

Become a Mentor

Apply to be a Many Hands Mentor, and receive training and support to help others

Access to free student support

Find out what else is available to support your mental health and wellbeing at your place of study, as well as other local and online resources

About Many Hands

Many Hands is a collaborative project led by Independent Higher Education (IHE) and seven specialist higher education providers in the UK. We provide a peer-to-peer mentoring service for students seeking early intervention support for their mental health and wellbeing. Students should be mature, or from Black, Asian or ethnic minorities, or studying a creative subject, currently at one of our seven partner institutions. Students will be matched to one of our specially trained team of Mentors across the seven institutions, connecting to someone who has faced similar life challenges, in a discreet and easy to access way.

Peer-to-peer mentoring is a proven effective mental health intervention, offering students in difficulty a mentor who has faced similar challenges and experiences. The collaborative approach also addresses the barriers to developing and accessing these services in smaller Higher Education providers. The Many Hands project will be producing a range of resources for dissemination to the wider independent Higher Education sector.

Many Hands is led by the Academy of Contemporary Music in collaboration with SAE Education, Futureworks, Richmond The American International University in London, Matrix College of Counselling and Psychotherapy, Regent College London and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.

The technology used to connect mentors and students is provided by The Ambassador Platform, the market leader in Experience Communication, and the project is being evaluated and monitored by global access and participation specialists Applied Inspiration.

The project received Office for Students funding (Department of Health and Social Care), which supports new ways to tackle mental health challenges in higher education.

This website was designed and built as part of the project through the collaboration of students from SAE Institute studying BA/BSc (Hons) Web Development and the Many Hands partnership project lead at Futureworks.