Navigating Invisibility and Regaining Control

Brook works with some of the Mayday team in Haringey, North London, using what he has learned from his own experience of systems surrounding public services to help the council and other organisations design more compassionate and effective responses to people going through tough times. Brook joined the Mayday team to speak at Shelter’s Conference ‘A system’s response to housing’ in March 2023. Brook shared:

When I was 19 or 20, my mental health broke down when I was at university, and I was sectioned. When I was deemed to be well enough, I was discharged with a support worker/ social worker who was tasked with supporting me back into society, which included support into housing. Which did not work. Everywhere you went, you had to present yourself and detail your experience. Which meant continuously living under the umbrella of your condition. So I made the decision to leave and start afresh. Which to me meant being employed and housed (privately). It also meant I had some control over setting a life not stigmatised (or defined) by my mental health collapse.

I don’t think many people take into consideration how impactful the labels that follow these situations are. Your social standing, personal pride and how people see you are affected on top of your situation.

What most magnifies the impact of labels is the systems for claiming support. I had to repair the degradation of this and recover from the humiliation. There is little support in coming to terms with your circumstance, acknowledging it and moving on with a better foundation.

After I got better, I was feeling good about being in work and having my own place, but I had a relapse in my mental health and stopped going to work and paying my rent. Because I’d managed to build a new life away from mental health issues, I had no connection with any organisations or support mechanisms. When I got evicted, it was like the people at the court didn’t even see me. I got home and found the locks were changed. I just decided to go for a walk and that was the start of living on the streets.

Something I want services to understand is how hard it is to find them when you are in a crisis and finding it hard to function. As a vulnerable person, your visibility is low and sourcing support is very laborious. It requires you to be very active and to know your way around the systems, which people don’t. So I ended up sitting in A&E for a few days because I remembered seeing homeless people using it for shelter, and it was the only option I could think of, but I couldn’t stay there forever.

The services I needed had nothing on the buildings saying they were for people who were homeless- why not make it really clear where to go? It’s like they are trying to hide or gatekeep their resources rather than helping people who need them most to find them. Feeling like they don’t want you to find them has a deep impact on you at your lowest point.

Services don’t think about what it’s like to be someone trying to access them when you are at your lowest. They have their ideas of what you need, and what the next step is, but that wasn’t my idea at the time. Being homeless was a terrible experience but it was also a way out of the stress of rent, bills, and a job: commitments and interactions which I hadn’t been able to keep or manage.

My situation was robbing me of any control; in comparison to how much the system required of me to navigate and engage, homelessness gave me back control without any stigma, which may seem strange looking at it from my current perspective. 

Services said you are at A, so next you go to B, then C. You are homeless, so in their eyes, each step has to be better than where you are, but I was thinking What then? I could just end up in crisis again. A lot of people want to get back to who they were before their circumstances changed. It is hard to come to terms with what you have lost when you are stuck in trauma, and that you may not be able to get back to where you were. That becomes a major barrier to accepting support. People working in services don’t understand that and define people as problematic. You have not necessarily come to terms with it. So your attitude is questioned.

I wasn’t seeing my problems in pieces, it felt like it was all one big thing and they couldn’t see the whole picture for me. They see your crisis as the starting point, but the crisis is always the last thing in the long series of events that led to it. It is the beginning and the ending. And the trauma means that you still see yourself not at point A but at point Z: homelessness, which is what you believe will happen again. So when you are put on this conveyor belt of support, your attitude is questioned. You’re not being problematic, it’s just that what you want to do is work backwards. Go back to who you were pre-trauma not necessarily to a new you which you still assume you will succumb to the last tragedy.

All my confidence had gone, I couldn’t express myself clearly. You get so far away from society, that bringing you back in from the cold is not simple – it’s not just practical help. The message feels like ‘it’s your fault’ but if that’s true, it wasn’t clear how being on this route back to being housed was going to fix everything, and with every step, another safety net was taken away. Also, as I was seen to be progressing, there was a delayed effect of the trauma of what had happened to me, which only really hit home afterwards – I could see later that I didn’t know how unwell I was at the time it was all happening. So services got frustrated with me. They couldn’t see that I was experiencing new trauma as a result of my progression, but the progression also meant I no longer qualified for the support. So ‘progression’ for them, was frightening for me.

I needed services which would build a system with me that worked for me, and where I felt more in control. It’s only when you have experienced what it’s actually like to be homeless that you can really understand how people think and feel when they cross that threshold and everything it takes to start coming back in from the cold again.

If you have any questions or would like to find out more then please get in touch. Read more blogs here

New Report: What next for strengths-based areas?

Report from the Social Care Institute for Excellence, Mayday Trust and Think Local Act Personal.

Published: November 2022

In 2017, Think Local Act Personal (TLAP) published The asset-based area, a briefing paper written by Alex Fox, formerly Chief Executive of Shared Lives Plus and now Chief Executive of Mayday Trust, which described 10 features of an ‘asset-based area’ necessary for developing strong communities and sustainable public services. Strengths and asset-based approaches in social care focus on what individuals and communities have and how they can work together, rather than on what individuals don’t have or can’t do.

A strengths-based approach to care, support and inclusion says let’s look first at what people can do with their skills and their resources – and what can the people around them do in their relationships and their communities. People need to be seen as more than just their care needs – they need to be experts and in charge of their own lives.

Alex Fox, Chief Executive, Mayday Trust

The paper identifies that strengths-based areas need to:

To read the full paper, What Next for Strengths-based Areas? click here 

The Charity Impact Podcast with Alex Fox

Mayday CEO, Alex Fox sat down to discuss all things strengths-based and systems change for the Charity Impact Podcast. Listen here

Mayday Trust’s Three-Year Strategy to Systems Change

The Problem we want to solve:

The systemic institutionalisation of people accessing support services.

The Mayday Vision:

A world where systems work for people going through tough times.

The Mayday Mission:

To model a person-led, transitional and strength-based system alongside people going through tough times and to build a movement of people and organisations to change the current deficit-based systems.

The three core principles of our work are:

  1. Listening deeply and learning: We aim to be led by people going through tough times and what matters most to them.
  2. Demonstrating that a different set of values and relationships is possible and better: offering our person-led, transitional and strengths-based response to people going through tough times, and supporting a growing movement of organisations to adopt and develop that approach.
  3. Influencing through doing and connecting: We demonstrate how to think and work differently, and we re-design local systems and national policy, with partners including the New System Alliance.

Our values. We are:

  • PEOPLE LED In everything we do: we are led by people going through tough times.
  • STRENGTH-BASED We always look for people’s strengths and potential in our work, our recruitment and how we work together as a team.
  • CHANGE MAKERS We are radical, creative and imagine a very different future, while always being willing to meet people where they are.
  • KIND AND CURIOUS We are never afraid to challenge others and ourselves, but we do so with kindness and humility. We are curious and want to learn. We take risks, get things wrong and are open to change.
  • RESILIENT We are brave, we persevere and we aim to build our own and others’ resilience. We keep our promises and we don’t give up on people when others write them off.
  • INCLUSIVE We are committed to building the inclusiveness and diversity of our team and our work. We challenge oppression and build equality wherever we can.

What has brought us here?

We have come a long way since Mayday first decided to attempt to embody the radical change we recognised was needed in the charity and support sector. We have established a way of offering support which has a strong theoretical base, a host of learning and resources behind it, and a growing evidence base that it works. Some inspirational organisations have joined us on our journey and been inspired to make radical change themselves. We have been influential beyond our size, and the language of being strengths-based and person-led has become commonly (if not always accurately!) used. We have developed the UK-wide New System Alliance and we are described as an important, even ‘totemic’ organisation for people interested in system change. We offer many people in the sector hope.

What can we achieve in the next three years?

Our challenge now is to remain radical inside and out, while growing our impact and reach, and becoming financial sustainable. This plan sets out how we can do those three things and manage the tensions between them. Over three years, we will:

  • We will deepen our radicalism by sharing our platform with more people and helping people who have experienced broken systems to lead more change themselves, and to shape our agenda, building a vision for a new public service system around their wisdom. We will continue to build the PTS Response around our relationship-first coaching, which also draws on community development, advocacy, coproduction and rights movements. We will draw on self-organising teams’ models to develop a radically devolved approach to decision-making, sharing power and responsibility.
  • We will grow our impact by reaching more people going through tough times with the PTS Response, demonstrating that it can be delivered at scale. We will develop the New System Alliance into a sustainable broadly-based UK partnership and we will launch and grow a UK-wide membership network for organisations delivering coaching. We will explore new partnerships to reach across sector boundaries. We will build our communications reach and support many more organisations and local areas to embed radical but practical change. We will build a person-led and strengths-based approach to outcome and data gathering, and to understanding the impact of system change work. We will share those approaches and use the evidence in creating more impact and shape the national policy debate.
  • We will increase our sustainability through building a range of new charitable and earned income sources, through building the whole team’s financial and commercial competence and confidence. We will diversify our team and our support for people’s wellbeing and performance, exploring how to move towards self-managing teams approaches. We will develop an investment policy which supports our ambitions.

System change is complex and requires us to combine different kinds of practical and influencing work. We will bring the different strands of our work together into a more joined-up whole, with at least three beacon areas as one of the most tangible ways to show how the different strands can add up to more impact than the sum of their parts.

Our focus over the three years will follow this path:

Year 1: capacity building. We will grow the team’s capacity and our services and support offers to councils and organisations, and raising awareness with clearer branding and messaging, while maintaining our current income and activity. We will launch the membership network, also building new bidding and delivery partnerships and developing a sustainable model for the New System Alliance. We will finalise our model for evidence gathering and build relationships with citizens and communities.

Year 2: investing in growth and experimentation. We will redeploy our assets through a balanced investment programme that includes growing our most promising and impactful approaches, services and partnerships. We will invest in our evidence-gathering approaches. We will invest in income generation and new forms of fundraising.

Year 3: expansion and bigger reach. We will raise our ambition for scale and reach, taking more risks based on the evidence of the previous two years, and aim for growth across all of our successful income streams. We will expect to make a significant impact on the government post-election.

Key targets:

By the end of year three, we will be reaching around 3,500 people with strengths-based, person-led work, via our own delivery partnerships, and our membership network.

We will be working with three beacon areas where we combine coaching, community development and system change at a strategic level, and our approach and values will be widely understood and valued.

How do we achieve that impact?

Three strategic objectives:

  1. Deeper impact: continually adapt, personalise and improve all aspects of the PTS Response, based on building our collection and use of evidence about what works for whom.
  2. Broader impact: Grow and diversify the PTS Response and Coaching Network, directly delivered by Mayday and partner organisations, co-designed with and reaching new groups and sectors.
  3. Influence local and national charities, provider organisations, NHS and governments to replace dysfunctional public service systems, & build a movement of activists and organisations.

Four building blocks – what we need to build into our organisation to achieve our objectives:

  1. Build and diversify our income streams including a wider range of grant funders, mission-aligned contracts, membership income and exploring corporate and public fundraising.
  2. Build and spread the evidence, learning and data for the PTS response and for systems change. Improve and adapt our approach based on what we learn.
  3. Develop our communications, brand and messaging, in partnership with people who are directly affected by public service systems.
  4. Make Mayday a consistently supportive, creative and inclusive place for people to work with a high-performing team living our values, and strong internal communications.

 

How we lost sight of the point of public services: The case for whole system reform moving towards strengths-based and relational services

By Alex Fox and Chris Fox

As part of New Local’s first instalment of their New Thinking series, Alex Fox, Mayday CEO and Chris Fox, Professor of Evaluation and Policy Analysis at Manchester Metropolitan University examine the state of public services in the UK today, and make the case for whole system reform, moving towards strengths-based and relational services.

Strengths-based approaches do not ignore needs, but they do look beyond them. They do not impose a single, uniform service on people according to what the service regards as their needs. Practice must be person-led: with the individual identifying their own strengths and goals and working towards them at their own pace, rather than the service deciding what matters.

Read the full article here

 

Support Worker: is the clue in the title?

Dannie Grufferty, PTS Coach and System Influencer in Haringey, explores the boundaries and challenges of the relationships she currently holds with people she works alongside and questions if there is a better way to support people through tough times.

I had a nice text this morning. Often a rarity when you work alongside public service systems, more often than not the homelessness system. A woman I work with has been offered housing. But why was she in touch, was it merely to share the good news?

I’m sitting here in the Wellcome Trust open access library; for once writing, after all those times in recent weeks I’ve told myself, “you must write more”.

It was a suggestion to come here as some kind of creative exercise, by someone I work with (not the woman who sent the text), we have been working with for nearly two years now, a woman who is going through a tough time and reached out after she was told about us by a Social Prescriber.

Getting out of the bustle of Haringey to the headier bustle of Euston feels almost like a day trip, particularly when you end up surrounded by mahogany bookcases above you, while below sit the names of the world’s physicians, neuroscientists, pathologists, and histologists. You wonder how many might be women, and then you wonder why you only recognise a couple of the names, and of those couple, you remember one only because you went down a radiation Wikipedia rabbit hole after watching Chernobyl.

Where was I? Ah yes, the woman I am here with today and “supporting”. To say our relationship might seem weird is an understatement. We probably look like two friends studying for our exams, although she is currently reading, while I attempt to avoid scrolling BBC News. What is it about trying to write that makes one far more interested in the BBC’s entertainment coverage?

The idea people in systems need a support worker to handhold them while they navigate a tough time is nonsense in my humble opinion. It was this woman who suggested coming here, as a thing to do. She’s not asking me to fill out forms for her, or give her advice. After two years of working together it seems to be a relationship she wants.

Relationships without boundaries

So, back to this text message. I hadn’t heard from this woman in a few weeks, and she was asking me something, she hadn’t asked in a long time. After suffering a horrid eviction when she dared to ask for repairs to be done, she ended up in the homelessness system in London, an experience I would not wish on my worst enemy (who is currently Harry Styles, in case you wondered).

I should state, she has moved boroughs since we started working together. It surprised me when I started working in this weird world of publicly run and funded services that if you move borough, any “support” you’re given is automatically rescinded. Even if it’s that very borough’s homelessness pathway that moves you on.

But I have since learnt that I am naïve in thinking that people dependent on the welfare state are deserving of long-term trusting relationships. Unless you can pay for those, you don’t seem to get any. And even then, paying someone to hang out with you seems a bit… weird doesn’t it (I mean we now have GPs prescribing exercise to people; perhaps paying people to hang out with you, isn’t as crazy an idea as it might once have seemed).

Commissioning is a funny business. The reason criteria for services is so strict is money. Afterall, if you go private the only criteria is usually proving you can pay for it. Most support workers’ funding is tied to a specific local authority, so they can’t move borders.

Supportive Relationships

Mayday’s work in Haringey is funded differently. So despite her move to a neighboring borough, we continued meeting from time to time, while I attempted to use my ‘position’ to resolve housing issues by sending (largely ignored) angry emails. After a time, things came to a weird sort of calm, despite her own housing chaos. She was volunteering, attending church regularly, making new connections and rebuilding her life (not that it is relevant, but just for interest, she is a refugee). Shock, horror, she didn’t need me so much – she was, dare I say it, becoming more independent from services.

Over the coming months as our relationship hit a steady tempo, we linked her with a few organisations, I guess you can call it brokering. She had some 1-2-1s with someone pretty high up at Shelter, we linked her to the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants.

Basically, we connected her to others and she would connect with us, but on her terms. Like the woman I’m sitting across from at the Wellcome Trust, we had a relationship, of sorts. Community Organisers might call it a “Public Relationship”, I’d prefer to just call it a relationship, not necessarily too different from the ones I have with friends.

We all have a need for human connection, particularly when we have a problem. Whether it’s the aphasia a woman we are working with navigates which makes the faceless soulless contact with council customer services extremely difficult; or whether it’s myself and my frustration with getting a refund from Avanti West Coast, we all would like services to feel a bit more human, a bit kinder.

Choice and control, a luxury or a human right?

I keep getting distracted don’t I – so back this this text. “I’ve been offered housing and I’ve accepted”. I hadn’t heard from her in a few weeks, not since a New Year’s text. Why should I hear from her? I’m not offering a homelessness service, I luckily don’t have to place demands on my “clients” to engage with me, so I can deem they are ready for housing.

(She didn’t want me to fix her housing by the way, because I can’t, and she understood that I couldn’t. Side note, we should stop pretending support workers can do the impossible).

But anyway, she did reach out, because now she needs a bit of support – navigating the complex world of furnishings for her flat. She’s never accessed a Mayday Personal Budget (a pot of money people working with PTS Coaches can access to use as they wish) yet, despite us working with her for two years. Like all the people we work with, when you give people choice and control, they spend time deciding how they want to use an opportunity to get the best outcome for themselves. It’s human nature really but for some reason current systems have complicated it so much that you have to submit a bank statement to prove you can’t feed your children. We don’t trust people really, and we should probably just be more honest about that.

Relationships first

What I’m trying to say is that services you can dip in and out of, should be normal. I’d argue that this way of working is also cheaper and more efficient of everyone’s time, and doesn’t tie us to a dehumanizing culture where a support worker closes a case without someone’s consent.

Sure, it’s tied to commissioning, a homelessness charity has just recently closed a case for a woman we are still working with because they deemed that “her needs are met”. Funny how they double-checked in with me, to see if I was continuing to support her needs. Ah, so you agree, she does still need some support? Maybe support needs aren’t all about PIP forms and purchasing furniture? Ask the average support worker if they want to be tied to the arbitrary criteria set by commissioners, and they’d probably say no. Perhaps the people – both workers, and the people we walk alongside – on the ground, should have more control over the relationships they forge.

To find out more about our work on systems that put relationships first Read Housing first, relationships second? By Alex Fox

About the author:

Dannie works in Haringey with people going through tough times. She loves working with people let down by systems, although it means she’s often permanently angry.

You can read more from Dannie here https://sunbeamsoutofcucumbers.substack.com/