Grounds for optimism in difficult times...
In times of long-term austerity like these, budgets are shrinking and many of our staff and stakeholders feel very directly a concern for their own wellbeing and indeed their own livelihoods. It is important, therefore, at times like these, if one is to strike a note of optimism, that such a note is rooted in something more than blind hope.
For many of our beneficiaries, these are tougher times even than they have become accustomed to. And yet, their basic needs stay the same. Most of our service users want to end their often socially and materially debilitating dependence on drugs. They want to reach a point where those who have a regular involvement with crime can desist from offending. They want somewhere decent, safe and warm to live: this perhaps more than anything. Our beneficiaries, like everybody, want some control over their income, however small.
People in contact with services like Lifeline want not to be asked the same questions again and again, each time seemingly in the name of a 'holistic approach'. Ideally, they want only one key worker, who, when they miss an appointment, cares enough to call them up to ask why. Of course they do. Were any of us suffering from multiple exclusions, we'd want the same things. Of course we would.
Could such an integrated and genuinely holistic way of working be created. Is it possible? Are our agency barriers and the boundaries of our professional disciplines so fixed that such a coming together on our clients' behalf could never happen?
At this time, many in the drug and alcohol treatment industries, quite understandably, are concerned about the ending of the ring fenced protection of those monies especially set aside for drug and alcohol treatment. This concern must not blind us, however, to improving and developing our work with and alongside our beneficiaries. We must ensure that the powerful wave of empowerment which the recovery movement at its best brings, must not be deflected by efficiencies and radical reductions in spending. In fact, and here is where the optimism comes in, we must use the tightening of budgets actually to concentrate our minds on building the human, social and cultural asset base of our work with our service users.
At Lifeline, we are now, more than ever committed to involving those who come to us for help in productive activity, both as part of their recovery and also as part of their post-recovery progress towards full integration and independence. Our own work in the fields of volunteering, peer-mentoring and ever fuller co-design of new services has now become a distinct organisational asset. And we are proud of what we are achieving in these areas. Peer led groups are now the norm in our recovery services and complement the ever-increasing role of enhanced volunteering. This is right at the heart of our recovery model: it is asset-based to the core. It will enable us to make a very full contribution to the communities we serve and it is as positive an application of localism as one could wish. Continued...
Alcohol and drug services, like Lifeline, are now well advanced with making that major cultural and organisation transformation toward a fully developed recovery-orientation. This work has, in many cases, been well-begun and, thankfully, our field is showing signs of tiring of the divisive and self-defeating arguments that have beset us over recent years. Of course, those who argued for a change in direction towards recovery, before it was fashionable to do so are to be thanked for their convictions and their leadership. The challenge of mainstreaming recovery couldn't and wouldn't have begun without them.
Of course the need for an optimistic and challenging new way of working with those in need is not unique to our field. Just as we have 'recovery', criminal justice workers have come to better understand and work towards 'desistance'. Desistance and recovery are clearly congruent and part of the same movement towards a more proactive, risk-enabled and co-designed way of working. Similarly, in the adult social care field, the 'personalisation' movement has been extremely important in challenging some long-held shibboleths about working with learning disability and mental health. In fact, personalisation, its methods and approaches, has long been practiced in many parts of Lifeline. Self-directed support makes demands on service users at the same time that it empowers them and puts them in control. In fact, national organisations like In Control have played a major role in championing and promoting the new ways of working.
Another organisation that deserves enormous credit for innovation and radicalism in their approach towards the multiply excluded is Revolving Doors. In association with the Making Every Adult Matter coalition, they have recently produced a Vision Paper called Turning the Tide. Revolving Doors genuinely and creatively look at the whole person and call for a top level strategy for people with multiple needs.
Speaking personally, I am most proud of Lifeline's work with the multiply excluded over the years. Our staff and volunteers have always had a reputation for being welcoming, showing empathy and reaching out to a group who may well escape the data sets of national monitoring and the straight-jacket remits of individual agencies, but whose needs are pressing and imminent nonetheless.
As budgets shrink and the numbers on organisations' payroll dip, social ventures of all kinds need to come together to empower and strengthen those coalitions that can best understand and work with groups who so often have escaped visibility and properly integrated care. At Lifeline, we redouble our commitment to this group and we salute and endorse the work of organisations like In Control and Revolving Doors. Together, we need to push for national action. In addition, however, it is our local cross-agency coalitions that will be the most decisive arena for innovation and change.
At local level, whether we are talking single neighbourhoods or clusters of boroughs, Lifeline needs to champion and help resource inter-disciplinary, cross agency work. If we are to live up to our new strap line, 'Reducing Harm, Promoting Recovery and Challenging Inequalities', we must strive to work ever more closely in tight collaboration with other agencies and practitioners. However, important our own ideas about assessment and care co-ordination, we should ensure our clients aren't endlessly assessed and over key-worked. The skills and commitment necessary to building single recovery/desistance/housing pathways is not just a 'competency' requirement for practitioners, it is an integral element of any 'learning organisations' workforce development strategy and, in addition, an equally important element in Community (Total Place) type modeling and commissioning. Continued...
As local resources and the new public health priorities push drug and alcohol funding beneath the minimum levels necessary for adequate, needs led commissioning, the need for innovation around social investment and private financing will grow ever greater. Already we see innovation augmenting many commissioned treatment systems. We have fund-raised from charitable trusts like the John Paul Getty Trust to help us support essential through-the-gate work so important for newly released offenders. Micro-projects like our new 'Directions' service, hugely enhanced by volunteering and peer mentoring, make a major difference to re-offending rates among prolific offenders in Calderdale.
But we need to go further. At local level, as we learn to give real meaning to the common assessment framework, we also need a common evidence framework and a methodology that enables us to connect 'primary' and 'secondary' outcomes. We need to measure real change through new collaborative methodologies like that employed by the GLA-based Project Oracle in the area of crime prevention amongst young Londoners. In its own works, Project Oracle "introduces programme providers to standard methods of evaluation, with a view to making organisations self-sufficient in evaluation and less dependent on experts..."
In addition, to demonstrating new causal paths from interventions to outcomes, we need to innovate in the field of finance. For too long, too much of our income has been tied to too few forms of financing. Contracts are absolutely critical to Lifeline and will remain so; our competitive performance as a key provider is critical to our sustainability and success. At the same time, however, we are much more ready to explore new and different forms of funding in order that we may pursue innovation, often at local level. Small sums of money raised against a variety of funding sources can make all the difference to, for instance, the degree to which local peer initiatives and volunteering can thrive.
Lifeline and our partners need to become viable in all those key areas that will render us suitable for investment. We need to encourage financial experts to design forms of investment that encourage the evidence-based pursuit of a range of intelligently chosen outcomes that speak to key government targets and also to the real underlying milestones of change and recovery that matter so much to our beneficiaries. Our models of change must describe our inputs, our outputs and our outcomes. We must be able to measure progress and to learn and develop in partnership as we progress. We must above all demonstrate that the social impact to be gained from joint-ventures are worth investing in.
As the rules of the game change, so must Lifeline change with them. We have, over the course of the last 12 months, conducted detailed consultation with our staff about our Mission, our Vision and our Values. This consultation enabled staff to talk very fully and openly about their hopes and fears for Lifeline's future. Critically, they were asked to look at our fundamental mission and the values necessary to pursue that mission with purpose and integrity. Our staff have told us that Lifeline's traditional strengths of close engagement with our service users, an abiding commitment to learning and an unswerving wish to work in partnership with others are key assets at this time of change.
Such strengths are genuinely causes for optimism.