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/ 

An exciting time to join Mayday’s Board of Trustees

Julie

Julie McEver, Chair of Trustees at Mayday Trust

I have been a Trustee for Mayday since October 2016 and I am thrilled to currently be the Chair. Mayday is a wonderful organisation trying to make improvements in our society by working with people and truly listening to them.

I believe this listening work is what makes Mayday truly unique. After hearing from people accessing homelessness services that what they were being offered wasn’t helping and, in some cases, even making things worse, Mayday has transformed itself and the support it offers people.

Since I have been involved, I have seen Mayday continue to develop this work. Building on its own approach, the PTS Response, that provides strengths-based and person-led coaching to people experiencing tough times, and further increasing its impact by using the learning from its approach to help other organisations and local areas create positive and sustainable change.

More recently, I have been excited by the work that Alex (our CEO) has been doing with our senior leadership team to focus all of Mayday on where we want to go and how we are going to do it. It feels like we are on the cusp of something very special and are now actively recruiting for new trustees who might want to join us for the next chapter, supporting Mayday as it develops and ensuring we truly represent the people we work with.

To do this to the best of our ability, we want to increase the diversity of our Board and look for some specific skills that complement what we already have. I personally believe that diversity means different things to different people, and I look forward to meeting those who are interested in joining our Board to explore how we could work together and what we could achieve in the future.

If you are interested in becoming a Mayday Trustee and have any questions, please contact me or Mayday’s CEO, Alex Fox. The team is also running an informal session on the 23rd of March to allow interested applicants to find out more about Mayday and ask the team any questions.

More information on the role and how to apply can be found here.

Learning to live with uncertainty

A key principle behind Mayday Trust’s PTS Response (a person-led and strengths-based coaching alternative to traditional support work) is that the work between individuals is a learning process. It’s a learning process for the worker and the person they work with: the PTS Response is a ‘relationship-first’ approach, based on the idea that for any intervention to have a positive impact, it must first establish a positive, trusting and more equal relationship between the person seeking and the person offering help. That relationship enables the coach to learn what matters to the individual, what motivates and demotivates them, what they need assistance with, and where they want to build their skills, confidence, and what they might want to challenge and change in the often sub-par (and sometimes downright oppressive) systems they are living within.  

That learning then feeds into the development of the approach and of us as an organisation, as we look for themes and patterns, and try to coproduce a constantly-evolving response to the people we walk alongside. We draw on the Human Learning Systems idea of Learning Loops, which posits that learning (rather than the often illusory achievement of outcomes) is the key indicator of organisational effectiveness, and that organisations should aim to learn, innovate and change above all else. 

This approach feels right. It builds coproduction into every level of the organisation. While we do lots to measure impact and outcomes, our primary purpose in doing that is what Gateshead council’s Changing Futures team describes as using evidence for learning, not control. In place of traditional control (tightly defined roles, tasks and targets) we aim to recruit people who can take on and be accountable for autonomous roles, and who can contribute to us learning what works, innovating and improving. 

The learning approach is exciting and creative. It offers everyone in an organisation the opportunity to contribute to change and innovate. But it is also inherently uncertain, because nothing is ever set in stone. This can create anxiety and even a sense of chaos: there are times when we all hope to find certainty, or the right answer. That can be exacerbated by the uncertain nature of the external world, the ongoing sense of crisis in wider public services, and the familiar voluntary sector uncertainties of short-term funding. So how do we manage that uncertainty? That’s another question to which the answer(s) are emerging and will change, but here are three things we are learning can contribute to a sense of stability and security in an organisation dedicated to constant development and change: 

  1. Strong shared values. Our values do not – and should not – change as often as our practice. They evolve as, for instance, more diverse representation in the team brings new perspectives and a deeper understanding of issues around oppression and racism. But a fit with our values is the test we most often apply when we debate trying out something new. 
  1. Values-based behaviours. Organisational values on their own can be broad and hard to use in practice. Who doesn’t claim to have integrity, or other commonly expressed values? And how easy is it to suggest that a colleague lacks integrity without conflict? It is the behaviours that we commit to that are more useful in reflecting on our practice and giving useable feedback. In our Strengths-based Area paper with SCIE And Think Local Act Personal, we suggest behaviours as the key way of seeing whether an area is changing its practice and culture in reality. 
  1. A coproduced strategy. Having a clear, shared sense of where we are and where we are going is reassuring. We have been wrestling with how to produce a three year strategy in which we can all see our work and our contribution, without drowning in detail. We have also been sharing as clear as possible a picture of where we are, including the realities of funding and funding challenges. That in itself can be anxiety-provoking in most charities, but less so than surprises: we can’t share accountability and genuinely influence organisational direction and practice unless we share similar levels of information about the pressures, as well as the opportunities, which face us all. 

I’d be interested in hearing from other organisations about the journey to becoming a learning organisation.  

This blog was written by Alex Fox, CEO of Mayday Trust. To read more of Alex’s thoughts visit: https://alexfoxblog.wordpress.com/