About the programme

Changing Futures is a 5-year, £91.8 million programme aiming to improve outcomes for adults experiencing multiple disadvantage - including combinations of homelessness, substance misuse, mental health issues, domestic abuse and contact with the criminal justice system.

The programme is funded through £55.4 million from the government’s Shared Outcomes Fund, £10 million from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and £26.4 million in aligned funding from the National Lottery Community Fund - the largest funder of community activity in the UK.

Working with 15 local partnerships across England, Changing Futures is testing new ways of bringing together public and community sector partners to help people change their lives for the better.

The programme was announced in 2020, began work in local areas in July 2021 and will continue until the end of March 2026. It aims to deliver improvements at the individual, service and system level:

• to stabilise and then improve the life situation of adults who face multiple disadvantage

• to transform local services to provide a person-centred approach and to reduce crisis demand

• to test a different approach to funding, accountability and engagement between local commissioners and services, and between central government and local areas

The programme will be accompanied by a robust evaluation, building the evidence base to underpin future work to support people facing multiple disadvantage.

The programme is being delivered by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government on behalf of government, working alongside all relevant departments and the National Lottery Community Fund.

The roles have been designed with parity at the heart ensuring equal salary, joint decision-making responsibility and comparable terms and conditions of employment save the obvious differences. Hight Intensity Lived Experience Workers are employed by Recovery Connections, a lived experience recovery organisation (LERO) based in the North East of England and High Intensity Workers are employed by Waythrough a national organisation working across mental health, alcohol, drugs and related areas. 

From 2021 to the end of the 2024/25 year the programme worked with a small cohort of people experiencing multiple disadvantage with a focus on learning by doing, using the Changing Futures funding to create a learning environment. In 2025/26 that focus has shifted to learning and doing with an emphasis on doing this work in the wild, outside of the learning environment created by the Changing Futures funding.   

Creating a learning environment 

From the initial design at the bidding stage, in 2020, the intention for Changing Futures Northumbria was to create the space for staff to work with individuals experiencing multiple disadvantage in a way that could surface, and explore alternatives to, unhelpful system conditions.

This therefore required a way of working that was suitably detached for the current system, as to not be hindered by it, and was robust enough to engage with the existing system whilst supporting beneficiaries.

A set of rules and principles, The Liberated Method, coupled with structured staff support (comprising one to one supervision, team meetings, case management & group supervision and peer support) and regular case reviews (linking leadership and decision making directly to casework) provided the means by which experiential learning loops could be developed based around Kolb’s Cycle of Experiential Learning.

Through 2021 to the end of the 2024/25 year the emphasis was on experiential learning with teams of caseworkers deployed at service delivery points in the system most likely to be places of high-volume presentations for people experiencing multiple disadvantage and in scope for the programme.

This configuration of resources at key ‘touchpoints’ in the system negated the need for a referral and assessment processes to determine eligibility, removing the need for potential beneficiaries to retell their story yet again. Instead, leaders in the touchpoints used their knowledge of repeat presentation individuals to inform approaches to potential beneficiaries and introduce the offer of support from Changing Futures.

Staff deployed the Liberated Method and used journalling to record all interactions with, and associated to, each beneficiary. The journaling supported a reflective practice approach, producing empirical evidence of how easy or difficult it was to achieve a desired outcome (based on what matters).

Journalling helped staff think differently about their approach with the aim being to coproduce support around an agreed purpose and reflect on aspects of the work that include...??

Learning was then derived from the casework and journalling through structured case reviews. The reviews focussed on key aspects of the work and sought to draw out common themes, patterns and ultimately test the validity of the programmes approach from the rules and principles to methods of learning. 

Since 2021 CFN has worked with a range of strategic and operational partners across the Northumbria footprint with a strong emphasis on understanding how we can achieve better outcomes for individuals, services and the system in a sustainable way. 



To that end, up to March 2025, CFN has not operated as a service, the service delivery elements of the programme have been the means by which we have learned.

The intention was never to create an additional level of service provision in an already crowded public services space but to understand how improvements for individuals, services and the system could be achieved and to be able to describe the changes that would be required for sustainable transformation to occur. 

In 2025/26 our focus will be on the transition from being a learning programme to do this work ‘in the wild’ which will include novel approaches to cohort identification (based on earlier service demand studies carried out by CFN) a revision of High Intensity caseworker job roles and a strengthening of the staff support structures and the operational delivery model, the further development of a commissioning approach to deliver primary, secondary and tertiary prevention and the strengthening of our multiple disadvantage partnership across Northumbria.

Multiple disadvantage cohort identification

Building on the ‘Burning Platform’ data that demonstrated the scale and frequency of demand for three individuals on the CFN caseload across a wide range of service delivery points, and the associated resources consumed, we are exploring methods of data interpretation based on existing data in the system.

This will include drawing down and aggregating data from multiple service delivery point across health, local authority and the criminal justice system with reference to high frequency attenders. The use of aggregated data will enable the identification of individuals across the system who are currently know (in isolation) to the system and at the same time are not identified as being the most vulnerable.

This will enable proactive approaches to be made to named individuals at the points in the system they are known to turn up most frequently.

In doing this the need for self-presentations or referrals and assessments for eligibility are removed.

Operational delivery

Over the course of the programme, we have been supported by several delivery partners. This has broadly taken the form of the provision of programme funded staff. In 2025/26 practice staff are employed via Recovery Connections and Waythrough who offer comprehensive staff support and development at an organisational level that ensure staff are best placed to deliver support to CFN beneficiaries. 

There is a continued commitment to building confident, competent autonomous teams that can build impactful relationships with those in the cohort in a way that supports sustainable change. A review of the Liberated Method, based on the most recent case reviews and reflections from staff delivering the work, will ensure current practice is informed by our learning. 

We continue to strengthen our approach to staff and team development and will be introducing Team Agreements and Confirmation practices into our delivery model with support from Helen Sanderson Associates.       

Changing Futures Northumbria is jointly funded through the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the National Lottery Community Fund.

In addition to the provision of funding both direct and indirect support to deliver the programme through the Changing Futures national evaluation (Cordis Bright, CFE Research, Revolving Doors Agency and the National Expert Citizens Group) and MEAM the national learning partners.

Gateshead Council act as the lead Authority for the Changing Futures Northumbria programme providing the required governance arrangements to manage the grant funding. 

The core delivery team comprises of staff from Gateshead Council, the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner for Northumbria (OPCC) and Waythrough.

Programme Delivery and Practice Development 

Over the course of the programme, we have been supported by several delivery partners. This has broadly taken the form of the provision of programme funded staff. In 2025/26 practice staff are employed via Recovery Connections and Waythrough who offer comprehensive staff support and development at an organisational level that ensure staff are best placed to deliver support to CFN beneficiaries. 

Strategic development

In addition to our delivery partners, we work across Northumbria with a range of strategic partners including Sunderland Council, South Tyneside Council, Gateshead NHS Foundation Trust Hospital, South Tyneside and Sunderland Foundation Trust Hospital, Northumbria Police.

Get in touch

To learn more about Changing Futures Northumbria, kindly fill out the contact form below, and a team member will reach out to you as soon as possible.

Alternatively, you can email
info@changingfuturesnorthumbria.co.uk