From talking to walking football to lifesaving links: £80m National Lottery funds to Men’s Health and Wellbeing

Adam Warbrick is a man on a mission. Engaging and coordinating ‘Manbassadors’ across Greater Manchester. The project started in Bolton where Adam works for Bolton At Home, a social housing provider with 19,000 properties.

Bolton, like other places across the UK, has been facing a lot of different challenges.

“We were giving lots of aid,” Adam explains, “food parcels to vulnerable people who couldn't get to the shops. Youth projects. Where there's fly-tipping on our estates, we'd do ‘green streets’. People who feel isolated, we connect them in our community centres.”

During COVID, Adam spied the ‘Manbassadors’ concept in various other walks of life. It inspired him to bring a version to Bolton, especially after community consultation highlighted a pressing need.

“We work with the community to help with the issues they're feeling. What we could feel from males was that their mental health was wasting. They were in decline. A lot of our single occupancy tendencies are males – feeling lonely and isolated.”

A serious tipping point for Adam came when two local men took their own lives.

“They were two young, beautiful lads around the age of 30 who had everything going for them: jobs, relationships, physically fit. For one reason or another, they each took their own life.”

The community response sparked Adam to do more.

“There was such an outpouring around their social network of people saying, ‘I'd rather be a shoulder to cry on than be crying at your funeral. I wish you'd just reached out to me.’ So, I wanted to create a project around men's mental health.”

Adam knew that men are not always open to chats let alone wellbeing services.

“How can we engage men in conversations? Then connect them to support services? Well, we recruit men as advocates: small businesses, community groups, charitable organizations, sports clubs, anywhere where men congregate – might be a barbers, takeaways.”

In a sense, these volunteer advocates are the crucial ‘middlemen’ in this human chain.

“We train up advocates so they could spot the signs and symptoms of poor mental health, to spot early triggers. Then they signpost backwards, where we could connect men to support.”

What’s a local example?

“Let's say the boxing club in Halliwell, Bolton: 400 members, predominantly male. Manbassadors there, and elsewhere, get to men where other services can't. And I have hundreds of other Manbassadors out there, looking out for people.”

Adam says being flexible is key to Manbassadors’ success.

“Most men said to us, ‘We don't want to speak to people, we don't want formal support around our mental health’. Lads will say, ‘We want to have natural conversations, meet guys like us who might be struggling, isolated. We want to speak shoulder-to-shoulder.’ So, we created safe spaces, community activities.”

How is The National Lottery Community Fund grant (just over £580k) helping Manbassadors to help local people?

“The National Lottery believed in us. We were struggling to access funding. We were not big enough to access any central government funds or Local Authority. And the focus often seems more on crisis intervention not early intervention and prevention.”

What have you done with the grant money?

“It has enabled us to expand. And take it to another level. It was originally just me trying to coordinate Manbassadors in the community. Now we've been able to bring together a small team, to offer one-to-one support for men.”

So, what are you doing next with the money granted?

“We've been able to grow our Manbassadors network. Hundreds of people trying to make a difference within their communities. We've upscaled into Salford, Stockport and Wigan. Each are taking a different approach. It's very much theirs – neighbourhood led.”

Awesome outputs, how about the impact so far?

“Since January 2025 Manbassadors has engaged 120 men, 61% have never engaged in services before, and 67% of them are under 50 – the biggest killer of men under 50 is their own two hands.”

While the human cost of suicide is Adam’s main point, he notes a different cost analysis by The Samaritans: “The average cost of a suicide? £1.46 million.”

That suggests the value of the Manbassadors’ prevention focus - a point not lost on Adam.

“We are a model of early intervention and prevention support. And we’re inspiring community ownership, collective action.”

How does Adam sum up 'Manbassadors GM' so far?

“Having started in Bolton, we're now six months across Greater Manchester: 170 Manbassadors.

We’ve engaged over 500 men. That would not have been achieved without The National Lottery funding.”

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Thanks to The National Lottery players, Manbassadors across Greater Manchester and thousands of other projects around the UK and Northern Ireland have had funds to support men’s physical and/or mental health.

Trimming the data
The first National Lottery money reached projects and communities in 1995, so three decades of data need a proper shave. Of course men have benefitted from the billions backing projects that support everyone - but that's too broad a scope. For instance, over £6m for The Samaritans has been left out of this story because they were not men-only projects.

A close shave
What has been included in this data story are projects supporting men’s health (e.g. prostate cancer), wellbeing (e.g. walking football), and mental health (e.g. Men in Sheds).

The final cut
The average moustache, apparently, has 600 hairs. There are nearly three times that number in the data visualisation, below – enough for a full beard and ‘tache.

Comb over each point in this data visualisation for pop-ups (also click for info panels) to see nearly 1500 of the most relevant projects around the UK - all supporting men’s physical and mental health, and in different ways.