Our Programme Manager, Aimee Hardaker, reflects on adapting and developing our support for young people during this crisis. This is the first blog in a series focusing on Settle’s response to COVID-19.

There’s no doubt that right now, our society is facing one of its biggest challenges. But with all this uncertainty, our team and the young people we work with have been incredibly resilient.

For anyone new to Settle, we’re a charity that supports young people as they move into their first independent home.

Why do we do that? We believe that every young person should be given the resources and opportunity to have a successful life, and a key factor to ensure that is a safe and stable home. We work with young people to support them to take control over their lives, navigate overly complex services and ultimately, manage their tenancy successfully to give them a  stable base to explore life from.

One impact of the lockdown we’ve seen is an increased demand for support – which has meant that lots of charities, including ourselves, have adapted their services in record time. Changes that you’d usually spend a year planning for have had to come into effect within a matter of weeks, sometimes even days.

As Settle’s Programme Manager, I’m responsible for managing our tenancy support programme. Right now, we’re a month into moving our 1:1 outreach programme to a fully remote service delivered through a mixture of text messages, phone calls and video calls. Since then, we’ve delivered 45 sessions to 25 young people.

In this blog, I will share our learnings so far.

Time and pressure

It always amazes me what you can achieve when you have to. Like many other services, we moved to a remote-based service within a week.

We did a couple of things to help with this. We opened up communication channels for our frontline workers by creating a dedicated Slack channel to brainstorm ideas and challenges as they came up and holding a weekly meeting via google hangouts to brainstorm in ‘person’.

This worked to ensure that the team could get answers quickly, learn together and share power around decision making. They’re the ones who work with young people every day so they’re the ones with the key insights and answers. 

We also created a tool to help us to understand the situation that each individual young person is in. One size does not fit all. This tool was crowdsourced from our frontline team, checking in with them about questions young people had been asking and questions they’d used to add structure to their sessions.

This tool collects information such as, how the young person is feeling, whether they have access to food, whether their job has been impacted and if they have access to data or wifi. From a service perspective, this has helped us understand the risk of each young person we work with. From a young person’s perspective, it means we can share relevant information to address their current needs, and from an organisational perspective, it has helped us to direct our fundraising efforts.

As a result of this tool, we’ve helped 6 young people access a foodbank. If you are reading this and want to know how you can help – you can donate to Trussel Trust here.

Adaptability

The most important learning and reflection for Settle is how adaptable our frontline team, our partners and the young people we work with have been.

We mainly work with housing associations and local authorities, who have been placed under extreme pressure due to COVID-19.

Despite this, they’ve all been incredibly flexible and asked us what they can do to further support the young people we are working with. We’ve had a number of challenging situations, both related to and separate to COVID-19, and I’ve never hesitated to reach out to the teams from our partners to ensure we are working together to support the young people. Now more than ever, it’s important for services to work together. 

I debated where I should talk about the young people we work with in this blog, and I’ve decided to end on it because I think it is important we all leave this piece thinking about the young people Settle is here to serve.

It can’t be ignored that when we talk about services being adaptable, the people working in those services are ultimately paid to deliver their work. The young person or another group accessing a service is not paid to use it. Due to COVID-19, the terms of that service have drastically changed overnight, with no warning, no discussion with them. Just changed. Changed during a time of great uncertainty. And, for the young people we work with, removed face-to-face contact with one of the only people they’d see that week. This is huge.

Despite this, they’ve been turning up. Responding to texts. Responding to calls. And the majority of times, using their valuable and limited data to video chat with us. If this isn’t extraordinary resilience, I don’t know what is. So this is a thank you to all of the young people that let us into their lives and who trust us to support them. You teach us as much, if not, more about the world we live in.