Taking Action for Mental Health: Ucan – Learn.Work.Live
Posted: 13 May 2026, in News
This Mental Health Awareness Week we’ve been talking to our members about how they are taking action to support mental health.
We spoke to Morgan Campbell, a Manager at Ucan – Learn.Work.Live, a social enterprise dedicated to equipping individuals who face challenges in their lives with key skills for independent living and work, while supporting them to live a positive and meaningful life.
Can you give us a short description of your social enterprise?
Ucan is a social enterprise dedicated to equipping individuals who face challenges in their lives with key skills for independent living and work, while supporting them to live a positive and meaningful life. We are a registered social enterprise providing tailored training and work experience opportunities for individuals with additional support needs, including those with learning disabilities and mental health issues. Since opening in 2013, we have focused on delivering life and work skills training to enable those who use our service to live more independent, confident and happier lives.
Over the past 11 years, Ucan has grown and transformed significantly. What began as a service for 20 to 30 individuals per week, has expanded to support approximately 60 people daily across Ayrshire, Glasgow, Renfrewshire, and East Renfrewshire. We now collaborate with partners in social care, healthcare, education, and independent providers to offer services to those who face challenges in their lives and their community, including school pupils.
What does community mean to you in the context of taking action on mental health?
Community is so important within the Social Care and Learning Disability sectors. To Ucan, community means being part of something that is bigger than just you, while also contributing to your local community in valuable ways. We do a lot of collaborative working with schools (including independent schools), Local Authorities, Health and Social Care services, Residential Care providers, Transitions Teams, Food Banks, and Higher & Further Education Providers. This gives us the opportunity to have as wide-reaching and as big an impact as we can on supporting the mental health of those in our community and of our service users directly.
The valuable services we offer, alongside our everyday service, mean that we can support the mental health of those in our community by, for example:
- offering reduced price gardening services through our landscaping micro-enterprise
- providing cooked meals for our local food bank through our community cooking initiative
- offering reduced price painting and decorating services for those in need in the community through our other micro-enterprise decorating group
- hosting a weekly café on a Saturday at our premises that is open to the public and is a safe space for individuals with ASN or MH challenges.
- volunteering at local care homes where we can.
- Having an active presence in our community so that people know who we are and the service we offer.
These initiatives benefit those who receive the service (i.e. gardening), but also greatly benefit our service users as, in turn, they can gain a sense of achievement and value from the work they have completed, and the impact they have had on someone else’s wellbeing.
How do you take action to look after your own mental health?
Working within the Social Care sector can be very busy day-to-day and often it’s hard to find a minute for yourself. I look after my own mental health by making sure I make time for things that help me relax like walking my dogs, going to the gym and cooking. Looking after my body and my health have a direct impact on my mental health, so making sure I get a chance to do all of those things really help me stay in a good mentally healthy routine.
Have you faced any challenges when taking action around mental health in your work?
To be honest not really, we are so lucky that we have a really strong and supportive staff team who are all there for each other and are very understanding. I think this is partly due to the line of work that we are in, everyone has a lot of empathy so in turn they are very supportive of any new initiatives to support Mental Health. One thing we struggle with is finding the time to introduce any new initiatives/ideas; we probably could be doing more but we just can’t seem to find time, so that is something we are working on going forward.
What recommendations do you have for how communities and organisations can take more effective action to support mental health?
I think just ensuring that everyone, regardless of age or experience, has the same opportunities to learn about Mental Health and the impacts and implications this can have on people’s working lives. We have to consider that there is still stigma attached to the term ‘Mental Health’ as a whole, so the more learning opportunities that are available to organisations and communities, the better. Ensuring people feel valued as people too, and ensuring they feel valued for the work they do as this can be a mentally demanding profession.