What we do

Our Appropriate Intervention

Bridging Model™

What started out over two decades ago as being local neighbours who slowly involved into professionals when going out onto the streets late into the night to try and prevent, intervene and support young people getting into difficulties, has been carefully crafted into a world class intervention model that uniquely blends both professional and neighbour led intervention with socioeconomic transformations for young adults aged 15-25 years.

Although we work with key strategic partners to do this work, we don’t depend on projects, programmes, referrals, nor the waiting for young adults to walk through our doors to engage or reengage them. We target and go to the very point of their need and context, which can occur before, during and long after any engagement they may have in our building or our programming.

Our Appropriate Intervention Bridging Model™ consists of four key contexts of a young adults life namely:

Lifestyle - Environment - Education - Career

These four contexts are supported with our three layers of appropriate intervention, and our programming is stage based working from a young persons point of need. This process is not administered or forced onto a young person where they are expected to be ready to go straight into the 'action' stage of courses and programmes. Even when our young clients are coached and engaging change, our uniqueness is in how we execute our relapse part of our model when a young person stops turning up or has blown out of a course or has returned to harmful behaviours etc.

Depending upon the level of need and readiness of our young adult clients, our team support young adults anywhere between 0 – 3 years that involves the transitional phases of initiating change, engaging change, through to advancing in change as young adults shift their trajectory and position and begin to live a positive and progressive lifestyle.

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Our Appropriate Intervention

Bridging Programming

At Streets of Growth, we are continually developing our programming projects and courses to improve the way such methods are 'fit for purpose' for the young adult clients they are meant to equip and empower to advance in life. This is why our approach to any programmes we offer are all geared to tackle the disaffection going on in their lives and in their communities outside of these course contexts and timeframes. Easier said than done, which is why our dedicated staff go above and beyond to address such needs of our young clients. This disaffection can include educational and career drop-out, postcode territorialism, group/gang violence, criminality, drugs, and associated behaviours leading to harm, poverty, prison and institutional/welfare benefit dependency.

Each programme at Streets of Growth makes up our system of programming and neither element operates in isolation because each is an interconnected part and phase of our Appropriate Intervention Bridging Model™ in order to connect and transform lifestyles, environments, education and careers. Our programmes are always evolving in alignment with the ever evolving young clients who we encounter, and who go through our model with differing needs. Please note: we don't 'fix' young people, we equip them to empower themselves to lead at Streets of Growth and in their neighbourhoods. Below is our ongoing foundational street programme followed by two examples of projects our young clients have engaged and transformed their lives.

Outreach and Street Intervention Programme

Unlike many organisations and charities that offer outreach and street work, at Streets of Growth we do not see and use this approach as a ‘detached’ element of our model of work. This is why we have designed into a programme itself that is central to all other programming we offer both internally and externally with our strategic partners.

For example; over the past year Streets of Growth has worked in an innovative partnership with the Police ASB team and Tower Hamlets Homes ASB team, bringing in Streets of Growth’s cutting-edge intervention model to provide a positive and sustainable route for young adults to make the lifestyle changes needed to break a cycle of harm, violence and poverty. Streets of Growth, with the police and THH, have developed an effective intervention pathway for identified young adults, which involves prevention and intervention, alongside law enforcement, when it is required.

But this area of our programming is not easy, extremely time consuming, challenging, and can be met with reluctance, resistance and relapse from young adults. However, this is their starting point of need as we build relationships to engage and stay in it with them for the long haul, doing what it takes to help see them through to a healthier side of living safely and positively.

Social Enterprise

One exciting component that we incorporated into our programming in 2012 was a social enterprise Turning the Tables, an upcycling and repurposing vintage furniture project.

Did you know? Over 7 million young people in the UK are living in families who cannot afford to replace a broken piece of furniture or electrical item! At the same time, it costs approximately £200 per truckload to take dumped furniture and unwanted household items to landfill.

Incorporated into this social enterprise was the BTEC Work Skills with each learning unit being built around the individual or group's need and ambition. For example:

· Personal Awareness Development

· Character Building

· Time & Stress Management

· Product Design

· Assertiveness in Adult Working Environments

· Working within an organisation (Intrapreneurship)

· Setting up an enterprise (Entrepreneurship)

· Maintaining and sustaining employment

Turning the Tables is a truly unique experience as it allows for a safe environment for young adults to learn the skills required for transitioning into the ever-changing competitive jobs market. Once items are transformed, young adults can either keep or choose to sell their finished products at our onsite outlet or external markets. As young adults turn disused or broken items around, so too, do they learn to turn their own lives around hence the title of our enterprise. At streets of Growth young adults work with us to repurpose over 80% of everything we use and discard, including our contribution to the reduction in dumped street furniture in our neighbourhoods and landfill.

Following the pilot furniture project, this programme ran for a further eight years until the site we used for delivering the project was closed for demolition in 2019. The Turning The Tables Social Enterprise now operates partnering with the creative industries such as fashion, social media, TV industries etc.

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Inspiring Young Parents Programme

Our Inspiring Young Parents Programme supports parents and single parents who are between the ages of 15-25 years. Both research and our experience of young parents engaging this programme indicates that they face many challenges and problems associated with being young parents. For example, many find it difficult to stay in education, which makes it more difficult for young mothers/fathers to find and keep well-paying jobs or careers. Even for those who manage to hold down part time employment, they can experience annual earning losses of upwards of 15-55%.

Planned and unplanned pregnancies and parenting can strain and

end the relationships between young parents and add additional

tensions between them and their nuclear families. Depression can

be common among young parents as they may feel guilty or

anxious about the future as they become more and more

overwhelmed by their unfamiliar and ever-demanding roles as

parents or parent. This can take all the joy and fulfilment out of

young families if issues are left to manifest, especially for those

young parents who may not have the right level of support from

family or friends. Many may not feel they can’t ask for help from

family or organisations because they feel they will be judged or

worse.

But this is where our Inspiring Young Parents Programme comes in.

We run weekly sessions where young parents can come in or we go to them where they feel safe to build a relationship of trust and unravel where they feel stuck or unsure. When they come to our centre we simultaneously support the young child at our creche facility whilst a young mother and/or father work with our team in personal and professional development areas that include:

Planning out their future
Develop a personalised plan of action to achieve their vision
Discover what wider external services and support mechanisms are on offer
Supported into education programmes
Supported to become employable and employed
Relationship development coaching between themselves and their young child

If you feel this is a programme offer that fits your needs then please get in touch and speak to us.

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“Thank you so much for your help. Without you I wouldn’t have got my job. You actually came at the right time – I seriously do not know how to thank you” Jenny

Our Impacts

The way in which we measure and prove our work strategically interweaves with how we design and deliver our model., which includes the starting point of readiness, and addressing the resistance or any relapse of our young adult clients.

Evaluation has been the biggest and most central challenge to our pioneering approach. Why? because we do not simply work with young people to get them on a programme or into a job and then move on to the next cohort of young people. Doing and measuring the work in this way only measures an ‘output’ and doesn’t measure how you got there, if they are still in a job, or if they have changed problematic behaviours in their neighbourhoods outside of organisational settings.

The young adults we seek out and encounter are stuck, socially isolated, and often caught up in harmful and criminal lifestyles and negative peer associations. Our interventions are usually first met with resistance for the first 3-6 months, and even when a young person starts to engage several months down the line, they can slip back and relapse into self-defeating behaviours that require us to shift our strategies to re-engage them until they reach a stage of maintaining positive and progressive socioeconomic futures.

As the knowledge and delivery of our work evolved, it became obvious that we needed a far more articulate language and robust measuring system that truly recognised the level of detail and lengths in which we go to in order to achieve our impacts with our young clients and partners. Certainly in terms of measuring 'outcomes' such as changing lifestyle. Previously, in collaboration with one of our international partners back in 2014, we were using a web-based evaluation system that measured our efforts and outcomes, as well as our outputs. However, when recent legislation changed regarding data collection, the company running the system withdrew from the UK market. As we measure our work against the same criteria that we developed on that system, we are currently developing a new online facility to advance the way our approach and impacts are measured, and that clearly and undeniably helps to reveal what works and what doesn’t to ensure we are true to our vision, mission, purpose and values.

We have recently re-evaluated our entire model of work and now solely focus our intensive targeted support on high need and risk 15-25 year olds, and work with a total of 200 young adults per annum.

Since being established in 2001, over 4000 young people have benefited directly from our work and services. Below are some facts and figures to demonstrate the impact our work has had in the east end of London:

86% of the young adults we re-engaged with went on to successfully complete their secondary school education

85% who were not in education, employment or training were successfully re-engaged into sustained career progression pathways

69% of the young adults who we re-engaged with were prevented from getting involved in gang

association and activity

39% with extreme gang relations who received intervention support were able to fully leave gang related friendships, violence and criminality

Additionally, many of our young clients have also gone on to help and mentor others in their own communities, as well as support us here at Streets of Growth.

Again, when you consider that it costs you the tax payer approximately £200.000 per year for a young adult to be incarcerated in a juvenile or adult prison, without no guarantee that will be released and not re-offend, and yet, it costs approximately £600.000 to fund Streets of Growth to work with 200 young adults per year with the proven impacts you read above (that's without adding the additional costs we are saving society such as vandalism, burglaries, Police etc and wasted costs on courses young people drop out of and don't complete which can cost around £3000 plus per student, where you you feel your money is best served? If its on our approach then do please get in touch. The hard reality is, that we can not do this work without your support whether that's governments grant funding, business or private donations etc. Every penny matters just like every young adult matters.