#BeTheChange

Alex Fox, Mayday CEO. Read the full report here.

The National Lottery Community Fund Commissioning Better Outcomes CBO programme supports social impact bonds (SIBs) and other outcome-based commissioning models. This funded Mayday Trust’s initiative, “Be The Change,” in partnership with Bridges Fund Management and commissioned by Northants County Council to make a real difference in the lives of young adults facing homelessness and joblessness. We worked with young people aged 18 to 30 without education, training, or jobs, and who are homeless, offering them coaching, creating opportunities, and building positive networks. Some had needs deemed too high/complex to manage within a supported housing scheme such as substance misuse or significant mental health issues.

It was one of the first programmes evaluating the PTS Response where coaches and individuals form a support relationship which is shaped and led by the individual, enabling them to identify their strengths and build on their potential, including through community development work and access to personal budgets. People often say their coach is ‘the first person who has really listened to me in years’.

The strengths-based and person-led approach worked – Mayday over achieved on nearly every measure as the table below summarises. It exceeded its median targets for successful starts, and for both entry to and sustainment of accommodation, and nearly hit a high target of 105 entry-to-accommodation outcomes, achieving 103. It narrowly missed its education and employment targets but exceeded its ‘outcomes cap’ – the maximum number of outcomes by value that could be claimed under the contract. So it generated the maximum value of outcome payments that it was possible to achieve across the local commissioner and CBO, but did not stop achieving positive outcomes and achieved an extra £57k beyond the total outcomes cap of £474k.

There were challenges though, particularly in changes in commissioning bodies which limited the potential for continuing or scaling successful work. The evaluators feel that the SIB approach was only partly responsible for the success, with a lot being attributed to the drive and vision of my predecessor, Pat McArdle. Although the achievement of education/employment goals was good, it could still have been stronger and the evaluators feel that other project approaches suggested that intensive, targeted support from education, employment and training specialists would have helped. (I’m aware that Kirklees Better Outcomes Partnership (KBOP), who drew heavily on the Mayday approach in developing their highly successful support partnership, combined strengths-based working with access to values-aligned support in linking people up with employment opportunities to great effect.) Depressingly, some employers tended to dismiss agency employees before they hit a 13-week employment target, to prevent them from gaining employment rights, which undermined some of this work.

So the upshot is that this was a successful programme which demonstrates the potential of strengths-based and person-led coaching to achieve better results, but there is also a sense of frustration in the learning: while our public services are organised through a commissioning system based on short-termism and competition, with little capacity for commissioning bodies to build corporate memory, learning and deeper partnerships, great work will remain fragile and undervalued. This reflects our learning and is why we are working with partners like Human Learning Systems and Collaborate CIC to build strengths-based commissioning (see a recent video about our partnership’s work on alliance commissioning Devon) and ultimately strengths-based areas.

 

Read the full report here.

Progress on a colourful brick wall

Sustaining a change in approach

Alex Fox, Mayday CEO

Meg, a PTS Coach in Northants, recently shared this insight into the experience of someone she was working alongside.

J is a young man who was experiencing homelessness, struggled to access health and mental health services, and had debts unrelated to his own spending. All of this had a negative impact on his mental health.

Initially, J was speaking with Meg several times a week and this was often after or during times of crisis; but today J’s support consists of an exchange of voice notes every couple of months – a change that J initiated. After building an honest and trusting relationship, supporting him to implement tools to respond to sources of stress, such as letters about housing benefit debt, or accommodation challenges. He began to talk about what was important to him, what he enjoyed and was good at – what made his life full. J successfully found work again and even felt empowered to advocate for a higher wage; as well as actively seeking mental health support through his GP, which then allowed him to access medications related to his medical diagnosis. J applied for a Mayday personal budget, a pot of money available to people working alongside a Coach, which paid for driving lessons to enable his career and independence in a rural area. J was able to decide what he wanted his relationship with Meg to look like and has subsequently transformed his situation. J no longer makes emergency calls and uses the skills, resources and support networks he has built up to navigate the ups and downs of life.

For instance, J has recently been made redundant, something that previously he would have struggled with. Rather than returning to previous behaviour patterns of making rushed decisions at the detriment of his mental health, J has taken this in his stride and isn’t rushing into a new work situation. He is giving himself headspace and hasn’t allowed this change to take over his life.

This is just one example of the power of forming a different kind of relationship with someone who has lost trust in services, and who is often ironically labelled by those services as a problem – “complex needs”; “disengaged”; or “challenging.” By recognising that behind every label there is a human, and being open to the idea that it might not be that person who has or is the problem, but the way that a dysfunctional public service system approaches people it wasn’t designed for, Meg walked alongside J as he built a very different future for himself, which has ultimately taken him beyond ‘service land’, hopefully for the long term. For me, this is was strengths-based and person-led work is all about.

Meg would say that it was J who did all the work, but we know how challenging, as well as rewarding, being a Coach or taking a strengths-based approach can be. It brings Coaches and practitioners into contact with people’s trauma and asks them to walk alongside people who are often marginalised and oppressed as they experience conflict with agencies which are used to seeing themselves as the good guys, and those they cannot help as ‘difficult’.

Meg explained her approach as: “To truly see a person and understand where they are at and the barriers they might face, you have to walk a day in their shoes!”

As much as strengths-based work can be hugely worthwhile, it can be equally as lonely. “It can feel like you’re swimming in the wrong direction or going the wrong way down the motorway.” was how someone described it during Wisdom form Strengths-based Working, a deep listening exercise carried out by Mayday to capture the voices of people delivering a strengths-based approach.

Mayday has spent many years developing the PTS Response, as well as working with other organisations to take on the PTS or develop their own strengths-based approach. Initially, I believe it was tempting for us to think that through the PTS we had found the magic formula for change, it was THE way to work. However, through listening and learning from many brilliant people, with a multitude of different experiences, and points of view, we have arrived at the place where, although we still believe wholeheartedly in the PTS and its ability to create more human and fairer systems, we also recognise the magic in others finding their own PTS Response, their own strengths-based formula for change. Because, together we are stronger, change comes more easily and there is more hope for people who are currently being let down by systems that don’t work for them.

This week we officially launch the Mayday Strengths-based Network, something we believe will make this crucial work less of a lonely task and nurture organisations as they navigate a change of approach. It will connect passionate people and offer a supportive space to share learning, gain knowledge and explore ideas. Currently, over 30 skilled, thoughtful and supportive practitioners and Coaches like Meg have joined the Network.

“Some of my best learning comes from the Network spaces!” Explained a Strengths-based practitioner.

The Strengths-based Network allows Coaches and practitioners to share what they learn, celebrate what they achieve with people who know how much it means, and for once, not be the only person in the room who ‘gets it’.

For Mayday, this feels like the next chapter in our mission to create public service systems that work for people going through tough times.

find out more about the Mayday Strengths-based Network

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

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/ 

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/

Housing first, relationships second?

We all know that to get help from public services, people have to jump through hoops. We take it for granted. But why are those hoops there, and what happens if you take them away?

Most were not put there deliberately to make lives more difficult (refugee policy being one exception to that, where the ‘hostile environment’ aims to use misery as a deterrent to coming to the UK). They are usually put there to target services at those most in need, and to manage the risks and costs of providing support to people. That sounds like common sense, but can often result in rules which are dehumanising for people who need support, and self-defeating for services.

If your goal is for people to become ‘independent’, it may not be sensible to start by forcing them to think and talk repeatedly about what they can’t do, and to take all decision-making responsibilities from them, so that their main role is to ask you for help.

Sometimes those barriers to getting help start to demand more and more of people in crisis. Traditional approaches to housing and support demanded that people who were homeless demonstrate that they are ‘housing ready’ before being offered a tenancy. This could mean demonstrating they had tackled drink or drug misuse. But substance misuse can be a way of self-medicating to deal with the stress and trauma of being homeless, and the chaos of rough sleeping can make reducing substance misuse almost impossible: a Catch-22.

Housing First prioritises getting people who are labelled as having ‘complex needs’ into stable housing, on the basis that it will be more feasible to address any other issues once someone has the stability of a long-term home. It’s a global movement and the evidence is strong that it works better than alternatives, despite it discarding the ‘jump through hoops’ traditional approach. People are more likely to maintain their tenancy, reduce substance misuse, avoid reoffending and have improved mental health. The evidence is so strong that it should be the default response, as it is in other countries, but in England, Crisis found only short-term pilots, able to reach 350 people at any one time. It’s not clear that all of these follow the full Housing First model, which involves an open-ended offer of housing (which Crisis notes a pilot cannot do). It’s also not clear why an approach which is demonstrably more cost-effective, breaking a cycle of crisis and use of expensive crisis services, and in many cases helping people to move away from support services entirely, has not replaced approaches which don’t work as well.

It may be that hoop-jumping, and the implicit assumptions about the endless needs of people who seek support are so engrained into our public services that planners and leaders simply cannot contemplate that if they ‘open the floodgates’ they won’t drown.

The incentives to work in ways which help people succeed are not yet strong enough to overcome the often very healthy economics of providing services which, ultimately don’t work. So, we should embed Housing First as the default approach as soon as possible. But what then? The evidence that the approach works better is undeniable, but it doesn’t work for everyone. It relies on the individual being willing to enter the world of services, and often to move away from the place they currently live and the relationships they have there. And it is typically only offered to those with labels such as ‘complex needs’, which can in effect mean that people who don’t reach that threshold of need have to wait until their housing issues reach crisis point, before being addressed by a Housing First solution. These issues show that Housing First, a strengths-based and person-led solution, has not yet been able to escape the deficit-based and rule-bound public service system it exists within.

If we were to follow Housing First’s rights-based ethos to its conclusion, we would aim to offer housing not just to those in the deepest crisis, but to avert those crises. We would ensure that the support and housing which was offered did not slip back into being service-led and infantilising once people had accessed it, but embedded strengths-based thinking at every level. And we would see that a roof may be the first thing we all need to have any hope of living safely and well, but it’s not the only thing. What turns a house into our home is the life we are able to live and the relationships we form from there.

Our relationships – the real unpaid relationships we hope to have with partners, family and friends – are ultimately what keep us safe and well, so support and housing must be organised around and in support of those relationships, not take them away from them.

‘Housing First’ suggests everything else second. But we can offer more than one thing at once. At Mayday our coaches take a Relationship First approach: just as Housing First offers stable housing without strings attached, we offer open-ended supportive relationships unconditionally. That stability doesn’t open the floodgates: it gives an individual a stable base, ends the damaging cycle of case opening and case closing, and enables people to rebuild a life and relationships beyond services. If we combined Housing First and Relationship First we would have something really transformational.

 

 

Come as you are welcome mat

What does ‘Asset-based’ social prescribing look like?

In a recent blog, Mayday Trust’s CEO Alex Fox was asked to explore ‘Asset-based’ social prescribing following an inquiry into the practice.  Alex’s blog explores how pressure on GP practices could be greatly reduced where this approach is taken.

 

Altogether Better’s pioneering work with GP practices consistently identifies a group of people visiting the practice regularly for non-medical reasons which do not improve, often with 80% of the resources being used by 20% of the practice’s patients. So if social prescribing link workers can build a rapport with an individual, find out what matters to them and link them to social and community activities, they have the opportunity to help those individuals in ways that GPs cannot.

 

The emphasis here being on relationship and doing things differently.  Alex says the issue with common models of social prescribing can be:

 

Some link workers having high caseloads, short timeframes, and rely heavily on ‘signposting’ to local charities at a time when they may have high demand and shrinking resources. Some ‘health coaching’ is provided by people with little training and with no obvious change model underpinning the work. This can mean that some social prescribing works best for people with less complex needs, in areas with lots of community activity and less poverty and inequality. This has the potential to exacerbate health inequalities and reinforce unconscious bias among health practitioners about who can be helped. Social prescribing was also not designed to engage with deep-rooted issues like poverty and institutional racism within the NHS.

Mayday Trust has adapted its strengths-based coaching and system model, the PTS Response, to achieve an asset-based approach within the Spring social prescribing contract, with local partners in Northamptonshire and Bridges Outcomes Partnership.

Alex argues that social prescribing works best when following PTS Response principles, a coaching method developed by Mayday Trust now being used as a model of best practice by other organisations across the UK, the key principles being:

  1. Seeing the whole person, their strengths and potential: avoiding forms, assumptions, eligibility criteria or targets. The coach’s primary goal is to build a trusting relationship.
  2. Being led by the person without ‘fixing’: tough times shouldn’t be permanent, but coaches stick with people for as long as they want, and offer personal budgets where needed.
  3. Engaged with the world outside of services: building connection and community, helping people to access resources and to challenge systems which are harming them.

Click here to read Alex’s full blog post on taking a strengths based approach to social prescribing.

To find out more about bringing a strength’s based approach to social prescribing, click to download the documents below:

What is STRENGTHS-BASED social prescribing?

Spring Social Prescribing Information

time to do something

“Mayday is an exciting place to work right now” Rob’s Reflections

It’s 6:30 in the morning as I look out of the window in my makeshift office. It’s the same room I sat in day after day during the start of the 2020 pandemic, working hard alongside colleagues in Westminster, trying to make sense of the Everyone In directive and ensure people had a place to stay safe. My time at Westminster is well documented, it had highs, it had lows, it had mundane parts too, but I learnt a lot and made some life long friends along the way.

 

Fast forward to now and I’m approaching two years in the job that changed my perspective on everything, not just professionally but how I interact with the world as a whole. So it is with a heavy heart that I have decided to say goodbye. My family and I have made the decision to move to Australia, the Land Down Under, to start a new life in the busy City of Sydney. My Partner is from Adelaide and when we met nearly eleven years ago she was about to return home, so I’ve been on borrowed time for quite a while now and for a variety of reasons, now felt like the right time.

 

Mayday Team African DrummingThere are lots of things I am going to miss, too many to list here (and probably not that interesting for you to read…) but leaving my role at Mayday was one of the toughest parts of the decision. I don’t underestimate how lucky I am that the role was developed with me in mind: Director of Change, changing the landscape, changing attitudes, changing systems. An incredibly exciting opportunity to have a real impact in how people going through the toughest of times interact with the services that should be there to walk alongside, listening, responding and focusing on what people can do, not what they can’t. It’s been a challenging couple of years, with lots of change. Mayday’s visionary Chief Executive decided it was time to move on, our inspiring, funny and incredibly supportive Director followed soon after, both of them leaving behind a phenomenal legacy of ideas, change and ambition for how we create a world where systems work for people. We saw almost all of our coaching team change, individuals who never fail to amaze every day, their perspective on life, the way they are able to hold a relationship that can be so fragile and support people to see the best in themselves, whilst vehemently challenging the injustices they see around them, it never ceases to inspire me and keep us all laser focused on our Mission and Vision. In this role I have been able to learn so much about how a charity functions, the highs, the lows, the impact that we should all be having in this sector. No longer were conversations always about what we need to get done, they were so often about what we wanted to achieve, what we believe in and how we will get there. I have been lucky enough to learn alongside some great people, a whole team of dedicated individuals who make finance work, who keep the whole ‘back office’ functioning, those responsible for culture and creativity and those that continually highlight Impact, striving for new ways to show this stuff works. Those that support our messaging and get the word out there.  Not to mention a board of trustees that, on an entirely voluntary basis, dedicate days and weeks of their time to make this small charity work. They’ve all been hugely supportive of me and I know it will be the same for whoever takes on this role next.

 

Mayday Trust is in an incredibly exciting place to work right now, led by a new Chief Executive, a man with so much knowledge and understanding of how charities can and should function it blows me away, he has been extremely supportive of this difficult move and has taught me more than I ever expected in the six months we have worked together. I will be forever grateful for it, but watch this space, it may not be the end – Mayday Australia anyone?

 

If you’re reading this and thinking, I can do that job, go for it, you won’t regret it. You’ll join an Executive Leadership Team alongside an amazing Director of PTS who has taught me all there is to know about approaching situations with a kind and compassionate outlook and a Finance Director who makes me understand numbers (an achievement not to be overlooked!) Apart from working in the chip shop with my best friend when I was 16 – this is hands down the best job in the world, I’m not crying, you are.

 

Until next time.

 

Robert White, Director of Change at Mayday Trust

 

If you are interested in working with Mayday Trust, take a look at our ‘Director of Development, Income and Impact Vacancy here.

What is Pragmatic Radicalism?

 

Alex Fox – Chief Executive, Mayday Trust

 

Padlock on rusty door

How do I Feel About Housing First?

Through our Wisdoms series, people have consistently told us that feeling out of control and not having choices in their life are two of the main reasons the system keeps them trapped and unable to transition through their toughest of times.

Having a place to call home, a safe place, a place where you can be who you are, without arbitrary rules and conditions is central to moving away from homelessness and away from services imposing themselves in people’s lives. This may take the form of a Housing First scheme, it may take another form. A range of options is important, but fundamentally we must listen and respond to the person in front of us, we must be person led.

When we treat people fairly, human to human, focusing on relationship building, trust, brokering opportunities in the real world, instead of focusing on fixing problems and achieving outcomes – we see great change in people’s lives. Being led by people, focusing on what they can do, building on strengths. This is the PTS.

I’ve seen the term Housing First taken, manipulated, forced into existing systems and turned into something it was never intended to be. If we continue to look at the system as something that needs to be improved rather than fundamentally changed, we will be in the same situation in ten years’ time and certainly will not have ended rough sleeping by 2024 – thousands of people, locked in systems that they cannot get out of, whether it be mental health, homelessness, criminal justice or any other deficit label we care to dream up.

We need to think bigger than the latest initiatives and approaches. Offering somebody a safe place to live, their own front door, their own secure tenancy shouldn’t be radical, shouldn’t be a novelty only reserved for those where we have ‘tried everything else’. Absolutely let’s implement Housing First across the land, let’s make genuinely affordable housing available to those that want it and need it. And let’s make sure people have the support they are asking for, not the support we think they need, available when they want it, available how they want it.

When this system gives up on the managing and fixing that we have tried and tried again, when it gives up on warehousing people in ‘schemes’ because we’ve decided they cannot cope and replaces it with a re-distribution of power, listening to people, building relationships, it is then that we will end rough sleeping, not before.

 

Robert White – Director of Change, Mayday Trust