Disrupting Exploitation — our first year
This week the Disrupting Exploitation team came together for a two-day residential in Manchester to reflect on the past year and to plan for the year ahead. We’ve learnt so much over our first year that I wanted to share some of it.
Our programme is ambitious. We work one-to-one with children who are exploited (with a particular focus on child criminal exploitation) and we work on changing the systems around young people so they work better in the future. Doing both in the same programme is tough — it means employing special people, working in multi-disciplinary teams, and giving them the space to challenge and the freedom to fail.
Our two days together were stimulating, challenging and head-scratching, sometimes all at the same time. A key message for me is that we still haven’t quite figured out how to talk about systems change, but I’m starting to think this is because we’re overcomplicating it. Asaybi — the Disrupting Exploitation worker in Birmingham — shared how she talks about systems change with the young people she’s working with, and the clarity and passion behind her explanation needs to be bottled. Using this as inspiration, we’ve set ourselves the challenge to come up with a way to talk about systems change that is owned and understood by young people. Rebecca — the therapist in our London team — shared a great idea for an animation to explain systems change which we’re going to work with young people to produce. So watch this space!
Despite the fact we don’t have all the answers, we certainly have some! We’ve been growing in confidence in how we talk about systems change since we mobilised our programme back in September. At our first programme get together in January we ran a session to identify our helpful and unhelpful words when it comes to talking about systems change. With these we produced our first systems change word-cloud. Our understanding was increasing but we were heavily reliant on examples, and couldn’t quite see how we put young people front and centre of our systems change work.
Over the last four months we have learnt so much about how our one-to-one and systems change work fit together. These two word-clouds really highlight this, and our new one puts young people at the heart of our systems change work. If we’re not changing the systems with them, for them and because of them, then who? We’ve also expanded our participation framework for the programme and with thanks to a colleague Suraya who ran a brilliant session this week we’re now seeing young people’s influence on the programme in four ways.
It is not just explaining systems change that is difficult, it also means explaining the programme is too. Some of us recently completed media training; there is nothing like being faced with a camera to realise it takes you twenty minutes to explain the programme you work on, and even then we all do it differently. We ran a session on our programme narrative to find a consistent way of talking about what it is. Hearing some of key messages the team used to describe our programme brought home to me that we are doing something quite special. Some that have stuck in my mind are ‘the power to do something about it’, ‘being pioneering’ and ‘taking the risk away from young people and being risk-taking and brave ourselves to think the system can be different’. I’ll be writing up the narrative over the next couple of weeks and sharing this on here to get some feedback.
To finish I wanted to share three key findings from the year for me.
Go wide before you narrow
When we first started the programme we were saying yes to everything. Lots of systems change tasks were heading our way and with enthusiasm we took them on and began work. We went wide, working in lots of different settings and on lots of different problems, after all there is so much to fix.
This quarter we’ve been getting ourselves ready for our second year, and in doing so we’ve been setting our systems change priorities. These have narrowed our focus, and are based on insight we have gathered from young people and system failings that we have seen through our 1–1 case work. We’re now about to begin testing these with young people and cannot wait to get stuck in. We would be completely unable to set meaningful priorities with any level of confidence if we hadn’t learnt so much in the first year — it has been a necessary process.
I have been really grateful this year to work alongside our funder — National Lottery Community Fund — who have helped us shape these priorities and have given us the space and permission to learn. Having moved from public affairs I was not used to working with funders and have really appreciated the honesty and flexibility our strategic relationship with the Lottery has given. I hope we have genuinely learnt from each other. I have been honest where things have been hard as well as easy; I have enjoyed their challenge and support. The programme is better because of it.
Particular thanks go to our grant manager Allan Anderson and also Laura Furness who has been so willing to share learning from the Fulfilling Lives programme. This has been a massive help and has put the programme in a better place for year two.
We go where the energy is.
You cannot do systems change in isolation. You need the system actors (of which we are one!) to be ambitious, to think things can be done differently and be willing to work with you on a shared problem. This is not always possible and some projects just don’t have that spark. All systems change is personal! A real highlight for me this year has been our work in custody. We started to look at custody as a teachable/reachable moment when children who are victims of exploitation could be better safeguarded. Crucially we saw it not just as a teachable/reachable moment for the young people but also for the system, which needed to do things differently. What started as a coffee with colleagues in MET detention has turned into an opportunity to shadow custody and to deliver training to over 1000+ custody staff in the MET (training which critically was about them — their roles, their systems and what they might be able to do differently, no off-the-shelf training here!).
We are now working on an exciting pilot to ensure safeguarding information is available in the hands of custody staff when a child is in custody. This pilot will also ensure that information about the child makes its way out of custody to better keep that child safe in the future. We started this work in London, but our other delivery sites in Greater Manchester and Birmingham are already showing an interest which is brilliant.
We’re looking for something special
We’re looking for something special on this programme and it hasn’t always been easy. We have had turnover on the programme and in recruiting again I can see we have learnt a lot. One reflection that came up during our internal quality reviews is that we’ve been having more rigorous debates on recruitment panels for these roles. Sometimes we find a brilliant caseworker but they can’t see the wider system issues around young people that needs to change to truly disrupt exploitation. Sometimes we have someone who really gets the system but not the young people in it. We need both and now I think we know more how to find it.
Whilst it can be difficult finding this special mix I remain of the view that by fusing the ability for one team (and indeed one individual) to do both systems change and one-to-one work together we bring systems change firmly back to where it should be, close to the young people.
