In praise of common sense, and of funders who ‘get it’

I am writing this post as a celebration. After a series of fantastic turns of event, we now have three wonderful funders behind us to carry us through the next three years, and support us to not only deepen and expand our work, but also to fund the evaluation we need to evidence the value of our approach in cold, hard data. More about this shortly, but first: the context of this celebration.

So much can change in a year or so. As 2023 drew to a close, with Christmas approaching, we were contemplating the beginning of the end of the Birmingham Pathfinder. Our two key funding streams were ending, and we had been unable to find a replacement. With heavy hearts we contemplated the road ahead, which was looking increasingly bleak. In the short term, we would need to make immediate redundancies from our close-knit team, many of whom had left permanent positions in order to come and work in our model, taking more precarious positions so that they could do the work the way they believed it should be done. Further ahead, there loomed the prospect of a gradual winding down of the whole project, as our initial scale-back became a self-fulfilling prophecy, damaging our viability in the eyes of any other potential funders.

This was painful, and really sad, but more than anything it was so frustrating. Since we began in 2016, we had worked with over 40 schools and over 2000 families. We had endless case studies and testimonials from parents – mostly mothers but some dads too – describing how our work had changed their lives, and continued to do so; and also from headteachers, so many of whom are drowning in their efforts to support children whose families are struggling with the entangled, complex problems that result from intergenerational trauma and adversity. Their testimonies reinforced what we already believed from first principles, and what we already knew from our observations of what does and doesn’t work across social work and social care: that people need a single, sustained, trusted (and trusting) relationship from which to access the various support that they need, and that, given, this support, it’s amazing what resilience, strength and creativity emerges from families who are facing some of the most extreme adversity.

At the heart of it for us is relationships, and the things that do and do not build healthy ones. For a long time, we have described our model (see here for more detail) as ‘innovative’, an attempt to draw attention to how our model is different from standard approaches: we provide support for as long as families need it (‘support on-tap’); we are value-led; we promote an ethos of ‘shared authority’, with many of our longstanding families getting involved in our work, and we are designed as a network, aiming to build an ecosystem of support aligned with our values, strengthening our families, communities, and relationships with agencies. But recently, we decided to stop using the word ‘innovative’, because actually, this is anything but. Our approach is actually based on age-old common sense about how humans seem to best provide and receive support to each other.

However, despite this, it seems innovative because – particularly in terms of our practice of ‘support on tap’ – it is a real departure from typical conventional approaches to providing support in the public and third sector. So much so, in fact, that we have often found it difficult to communicate our approach in a way that will fit into the templates and expectations of funders, partners and evaluators. The idea of time-bound interventions is so baked into the DNA of the system that even funders who are explicitly asking for ‘innovative approaches’ to support and/ or evaluate seem to struggle to understand or accommodate what we do.

This is why it has been so gratifying when we have met funders who have truly understood the rationale and value of what we are doing. In 2016 we made contact with grant officers at Lankelly Chase Foundation, who not only understood what we were trying to achieve, but provided stalwart support (financial as well as moral)  which helped to keep us going until the foundation announced in 2024 that it was ceasing operating. It was the ending of Lankelly Chase’s support, coinciding with the winding down of funding from Birmingham Children’s Trust which led to the cliff edge we were facing at the end of 2023.

Then, early in 2024, Jean Templeton, CEO of St. Basils (who have been long term delivery partners, providing training in psychologically-informed practices to our staff and families) put us in contact with Seyi Obakin, CEO of the national youth homelessness charity, Centrepoint. With so many such hopeful-looking introductions ultimately leading nowhere, we were initially cautious of expecting too much, but Seyi immediately understood our mission, and saw it as well-aligned with Centrepoint’s own. Miraculously that March, after only a few weeks’ discussion, one year’s support was agreed, allowing us to heave a sigh of relief and step back from the brink. It also gave us a much firmer ground to stand on in our discussions with other potential funders, one of whom was the local Birmingham-based JABBS Foundation, who are focussed on supporting work that diverts women and girls from becoming involved in the criminal justice system.

Now, a year later, we are happily able to announce that the JABBS Foundation have also agreed to support our work for the next three years, as well as to fund a 3-year research evaluation of the impacts of our work, to be undertaken by the University of Birmingham. Although we received a positive rapid evaluation from Social Finance back in 2021, a rigorous, longitudinal research evaluation is something which we have been seeking funding for without success for some time. Given the ‘innovative’ (or, rather, as we now say, ‘common sense’) nature of our approach, we hope that this evaluation will provide the hard data to support our strongly-held contention that long-term, sustained, trusted support, that is value-led, is not only more effective in improving people’s lives, but is also – when taken over the long term and on aggregate (and this is the key) – more efficient at doing this. Despite the many, many stories and testimonials we already have that attest to this at the level of people, families and schools, it is statistics that we need to make our case at a more strategic and policy-level.

As well as the obvious relief that we can keep our wonderful staff team, and continue to deepen and develop our work and our approach, it has also been wonderful to see how these two organisations have been able to see how our work in family support is a vital part of the upstream current of their own, in both youth homelessness and women’s involvement in the criminal justice system respectively. It is deeply invigorating and reassuring to see organisations with such superficially diverse foci coming together over the shared understanding of the crucial importance of family support.

The final icing on the cake has been that on 3^rd April we heard that we have been successful in our bid for National Lottery Reaching Communities funding.  As in all three of these funding conversations, it has felt that the human beings on the other side of the table have really ‘got’ what it is we do, and – whether this has resulted in a swift decision, or a more long-winded, back and forth exchange – we have been able to get funding for exactly what it is that we do, without compromising the unconventional, but essential core of our approach. After much stress and even despair, at the 11^th hour, it feels like common sense is finally winning the day.