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The Everton Foundation has won a Mersey Care NHS Trust Positive Achievement Award for its pioneering mental health football programme 'Imagine Your Goals'.

Staff and service users received the Authentic Engagement Team Award at St George's Hall on Tuesday.

'Imagine Your Goals' started last year as a one-hour community coaching session for mental health service users, and growing quickly into one of the Everton Foundation's largest and most dynamic projects.

The programme developed a series of football leagues, training programmes and coaching qualification courses for both men and women aged 16 and upwards across Merseyside.

Over the past 12 months 30 mental health patients and community link-workers have gained an FA Level 1 coaching award, while other certificates have been awarded for First Aid and Child Protection.

Chris Clarke, project development manager, said: "This is a culmination of two years' hard work and we have many reasons to feel proud. The award belongs to all the service-users who have demonstrated a commitment and passion to the project and have worked hard to remove the negative stigma often attached to mental illness."

Over the next two years the team aims to hold six weekly community sessions, expand their football league to 12 teams and engage more than 100 service users each month.

Carol Bernard, Service Director for the Adult Mental Health Directorate at Mersey Care NHS Trust, nominated the Foundation team for the award.

She said: "The team has set out to engage proactively with existing community based service users and also initiated a targeted approach for hard-to-reach service users."