A chance encounter, a change lover, a National Insurance increase and a budget cut – could all these things result in one of the biggest changes in St Martins history?
For many years, St Martins in Norwich has delivered specialist support in a traditional and highly successful way. As the charity has grown we have used the same tried and tested model of providing specialist support within each of our projects. We always acknowledge that putting a roof over someone’s head is often the easiest part of a recovery journey.
The old adage…..’if you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always had’ certainly rings true! At St Martins we have always prided ourselves in delivering what is asked of us (and more), we’ve been conformist and if I’m honest a little subservient. All great components of an effective working relationship with key stakeholders but sometimes at the detriment of the charity.
All that was set to change when I was asked to speak at a Homeless Link conference last year. It’s always a great honour to be asked to speak at a national conference; it means someone has recognised that you may have something to say that is worth listening to and you may be a halfway decent presenter. After my presentation (which must have gone reasonably well as I’ve been asked back to talk at the national Leadership conference in December) I reviewed the list of workshops.
There were lots of interesting options for me to select from before I jumped on my train back to rural Norfolk but one caught my eye. It was a workshop exploring how we can use the Psychologically Informed Environment (PIE) principles not just for the people we support but also for our team members. As a charity which has won national awards for PIE work and has almost two hundred team members this idea was one of real interest to me.
The facilitator was Valerie Boogaard from HVO-Querido in Amsterdam. Not only was her style of workshop engaging but her thoughts and ways of working really resonated with me. I left the workshop with food for thought which I pondered for a couple of weeks before deciding that we really did need to know more about this at St Martins.
One of the (few) upsides of Covid is how much better we all are at using technology and how we now think nothing of contacting colleagues in different countries to set up Teams meetings. I found Valerie more than willing to meet with us and after a successful meeting we agreed that she would come and talk to our Senior Management Team (SMT).
It was at this point that I became a little twitchy….Valerie was asking me a lot of questions and was preparing a Monopoly-style game for the session together……….what if I’d called it wrong and my SMT didn’t really embrace the thinking of someone traveling from another country to share her work with us? I heard myself saying ‘I don’t know how this will go but just roll with it’. I have a fantastic SMT and I certainly could have spared myself any worry if I had just reminded myself of this. They obviously got it, thoroughly enjoyed the session and as Valerie had challenged me, they too felt challenged.
Not only do we have a great SMT at St Martins but I am blessed with a team of exceptional directors who have years of experience in our sector. Unlike me, Maria, our Director of Homeless Services loves change, finds it stimulating and exciting….speaking as someone whose whole house has been the same colour for over thirty years this concept is alien to me, but I have learnt to value this approach.
What Maria took from our session with Valerie is ‘it doesn’t always have to be like this’. At St Martins we put a lot of effort into moving people onto the next stage of their journey out of homelessness. Sometimes this is exactly what is needed but other times they may not be ready. Nevertheless, we push on; people should only stay in accommodation for two years …..right? No, wrong! People should move when they are ready to not when we need to tick a box. We clearly needed to be more person centred!
Whilst Maria was developing her thinking about how we work; I was grappling with a significant increase in our salary bill (thank you Rachel from accounts) and a sizeable decrease in local authority funding for our homeless services. The irony of this cut in funding is that homeless services are not statutory services. Therefore they are a soft target for cuts but……. the people needing homeless services are some of the most vulnerable people in society. I don’t think I’ll ever manage to make sense of that…..why would we leave our most vulnerable people to die on the streets rather than provide accommodation? That’s a whole different blog though!
After a few weeks Maria arrived with a fully formed plan which made perfect sense and left us both wondering why we didn’t do it before. We agreed a six month change programme and now we’re about to embrace a new way of working:
- The people who use our services won’t move on until they are ready – a reduction in funding means we have fewer boxes to tick so we can be more person centred
- We’ve changed the way team members work – some will provide floating support, others will be shift focused, addressing immediate issues and needs.
- Our floating support workers will work alongside people who use our services throughout their time with us, regardless of where they are living. They tell us their story once and they get consistent support.
- Our shift workers will work across projects sharing expertise, skills and experience and (hopefully) will have a more enriching and stimulating role.
The icing on the cake is that this remodelling has saved money at a time when we desperately needed to. Whilst navigating funding cuts and NI increases, we were working incredibly hard to retain all our front-line services which meant some very difficult decisions had to be made about back-office infrastructure.
However, the driving force behind the change is that the people who use our services will get a more consistent, person-centred service from us which will provide them with a firmer foundation for their recovery journey.
I didn’t expect my journey to London last summer to be the catalyst for seismic change, but it just shows catalysts for change come in all different shapes and sizes. Those seeds of change just need fertile ground and great growing conditions.
Dr Jan Sheldon
Chief Executive
St Martins