Off the Record Bristol

Call us... 0800 808 9120

Home
About Us

More

About Us

We are a charity and registered company working across Bristol and the surrounding area. Our concern and work is focussed on the mental health and emotional well-being of children and young people aged 11-25.

We offer a range of therapeutic services, training, research and consultancy, as well as participatory campaigns alongside local young people. On these pages you will find information about our long and proud history, our governance, and our contact details. We couldn’t exist without the dedication and generosity of our volunteers and donors, and you will find all you need to know about both of these crucial roles here too.

Our Delivery Philosophy

OTR’s delivery philosophy starts from an ethic of authenticity and is founded on core principles of participation, empowerment and social justice. We work to an ‘assets model’ of mental health that regards young people, families, and communities as potential architects of recovery and social change.

We recognise the social, political, and historical context OTR operates in, and the multiple ways in which global processes (market economics, migration, technologies, political conflict) impact upon the local communities we serve. The roles, identities, and developmental pathways open to different children and young people are changed by these processes. A landscape of this kind requires innovative mental health services that are sensitive and reflexive, that recognise the underlying assumptions they make about the various ways in which mental health is constructed, experienced and expressed among different groups.

In response to this context and the diversity of our service users, OTR embraces a postmodern theoretical orientation and draws creatively from post-structural, feminist, post-colonial, and critical race values, theories and approaches.

We recognise children and young people as social actors in their own right and embrace the spirit and articles of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. To this end we regard the material inequalities and disadvantage many young people are borne to and that prejudice their long-term mental health and life chances as central to our concern and work. Consequently, our delivery philosophy seeks always to maximise young peoples agency and voice both within OTR and wider public life.

Our Aims & Objectives

To become a young person led and centered organisation.
To support young people to emotionally and practically empower themselves through the provision of counselling, information, participation, and development work.
To promote the positive mental health and well-being of all young people.
To promote young people’s rights and participation in relation to mental health and well-being in all areas of public life.

Our values

We believe all young people, irrespective of their social, economic and/or cultural circumstances have the right to accessible, free, meaningful, therapeutic support.
We believe in the value of this support socially and the need to advocate for its provision and for the mental health and well-being of children and young people more generally.
We believe young people are best placed to articulate their wants and needs from our service and that they have the right not only to a voice, but also to participate in and lead our work.
We believe young people have a right to be heard in wider society and that much of what they experience as individuals emotionally, they have a shared social and political interest in challenging publicly.