About us
Changing Futures Northumbria started supporting people in January 2022. We are funded until the end of March 2025.
OUR WORK
We currently operate in four 'touch points' across the North East of England within existing services:
- A homelessness drop in centre in Gateshead
- Alcohol care team in hospitals in Sunderland & South Tyneside
- Acute setting within a hospital in Gateshead
- Specialist women's service in Newcastle
We do not take referrals from other services; instead teams work with people already accessing these services who have been identified as more complex or in need of more intense support.
Staff work in pairs which generally consist of a 'generalist' caseworker, often with a background specialism, and a peer support specialist who has similar life experience to the people being supported.
They use the Liberated Method to build trusting relationships with the people they support. This enables them to focus on what really matters to the person and work together to help them overcome obstacles in their life and start to thrive.
OUR LEARNING
Learning has been a key feature of Changing Futures since the beginning. There are several ways in which we incorporated learning into the programme:
- Regular case management reviews where staff come together to discuss individual cases to learn what works and what challenges staff and citizens are facing.
- A ‘burning platform’ which explores people’s historic engagement with services to allow us to see the social and financial impact of the Liberated Method.
- Regular and ongoing analysis of data and information so we can understand what’s happening in the work.
- Continuous evaluation and review of what is, and isn’t, working which has allowed the work to iterate in response to demands and emerging issues.
- Ethnographic research to understand how it feels as a member of staff to do this kind of work and how it feels to be the person being supported in this way.
- Sense checking and feedback from key partners and organisations we work with who see what we’re doing from the outside looking in.
OUR AMBITION
Over the last few years we have seen first hand the impact that using the Liberated Method has on people’s lives.
Our aspiration is for all public services to work in a relational way, putting the person at the centre of the work and allowing services to really make a difference in people’s lives and the communities they live in.
By creating capacity and capability, we hope to liberate public services from the current situation where arbitrary targets, strangled funding streams and risk avoidance strategies mean that too many people slip through the net and don’t get the help they desperately need.
We are not claiming to have reinvented the wheel; rather we are part of a growing movement of radical thinkers and public service reformists who believe in seeing people as human beings who deserve the opportunity to thrive.
