Contact Youth Counselling was established in 1977 in response to a growing recognition that young people have complex and diverse mental health needs which were not being met within the youth  and education sectors and had to be very pronounced to be addressed within the health sector.

The NI Mental Health Association were instrumental in the establishment of the charity and the Youth Council for NI provided the first core funding for the organisation.

As the years have progressed so has the expertise and reputation of Contact Youth Counselling who initiated groundbreaking projects in the areas of telephone counselling services, drugs and alcohol counselling and schools counselling services all mainly targeted at young people in the 11-25 age range and  all of which still exist today. In the last year Contact Youth have been successful in developing a schools counselling service into every post primary school in NI and in launching a 24/7 telephone and wrap around counselling and mentoring project in N&W Belfast specifically aimed at those most at risk from suicide and self harm.

Contact Youth Counselling have always worked in partnership with other organisations both statutory and voluntary to develop and deliver our services.  And in more recent years have taken this partnership model of working even further to enable our services to reach out into local communities throughout NI.

Our main sources of funding for our work are the Department of Education who fund our Schools counselling programme in all post primary schools throughout NI. The YCNI  and CRC are the only  core funders of the organisation. The Big Lottery, N&WH&SST and DHSS&PS fund Youthline 24/7. The Executive Programme Fund  supports our work in the NH&SSB and various Health Trusts  and Investing for Health provide funding for community based counselling services. The CHILL projects are funded by both Southern Drug and Alcohol Coordinating Team and Eastern Durg and Alcohol Coordinating Team under The New Strategic Direction for Drugs and Alcohol for the work in the Eastern and Southern board areas . Our Sexual Identity project is a pilot funded by the NH&SSB under their suicide strategy.

As a Charity we also welcome donations.

The following is a table of statistics showing work carried out by all our projects in the financial year 2006-2007.

Currently Contact Youth Counselling Services employ a number of full time, part time and sessional counsellors,  we employ around 70 therapists as well as having a team of 30 clinical placements working voluntarily to deliver all our counselling services to young people aged 8-25 throughout Northern Ireland.

The CEO is in charge of central services and fundraising for the organisation as well as being involved with developmental projects.  While our Clinical Co-ordinator is responsible for the overall clinical management of our work and ensuring we are working within BACP guidelines he along with our Special Programmes Director lead and manage all the clinical staff and provide a clinical consultancy facility to over 100 therapists currently working for us.   These three staff make up our Strategic Team and are responsible for the overall management and direction of the agency.  Our Board of Directors have overall responsibility for risk assessment of the organisation and its management.  They come from a wide variety of backgrounds including voluntary, statutory, health, education and business.