Our Appropriate Intervention

Bridging Model™

What started out over two decades ago with going out onto the streets late into the night to try and prevent and intervene on young people getting into difficulties, has been carefully crafted into a world class intervention model that uniquely blends both professional and community led intervention with socioeconomic transformations for young adults aged 15-25 years. 

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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.

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Our Appropriate Intervention Bridging Model™ offers four key interventions that make up our system of support for the young clients we serve and partner, namely:

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• Lifestyle

• Environment

• Education

• Career

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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

Streets of Growth are continually developing our programming models that improve the way we understand the field of intervention with young adults, and all are geared to tackle the disaffection going on in their lives and in their communities.

This disaffection includes 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 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. Below is our ongoing foundational street programme followed by two examples of projects our young clients have engaged and led.  

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Outreach and Street Intervention Programme

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Outreach and street intervention work are not ‘detached’ elements at Streets of Growth. We have designed them as a programme that is central to all other programming we offer both internally and 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 the young adult. But 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

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

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

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

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·         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

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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. 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.

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If you have any unwanted vintage furniture items, then do please get in contact with us.

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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 15-35%. 

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, ever-demanding roles as

parents or parent. This can take all the joy and fulfillment 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 development areas that include:

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• Plan 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 employ-able and employed

• Relationship development coaching between themselves and their young child

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

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 clients.

One of the biggest and most central challenges to our pioneering approach in this highly controversial field of work is evaluation, Why? because we do not simply work with young people to get them on a programme or into a job, simply measuring that and then moving on to the next cohort of young people.  Doing and measuring the work in this way is itself,  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 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. One that clearly and undeniably reveals what works and what doesn’t to ensure we are true to our vision, mission, purpose and values. This is why back in 2014 we partnered with one of our international collaborators to help us develop a measuring model that that is fit for purpose.

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 150 young adults per annum.

Since being established in 2001, over 3,300 young people have benefited directly from our work and services.

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Here are a few facts and figures to demonstrate the impact our work has had in the east end of London:

86% of the young adults we 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 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

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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.

Awards & Recognitions

Chris Donavan Trust

2017 Winner

NatWest & RBS Skills & Opportunities Award for the London Region.

2017 Winners of the Lifetime Achievement Award

​The Chris Donovan Trust

2016 Winners of The Magic for Change Award 

Portsmouth & District Magic Circle

Chris Donavan Trust

2014 Winners of The Dispossessed Fund Award for transformative work with gangs and vulnerable young people.

The Evening Standard

2013 Winners of The Jane Foster-Smith Memorial Award

The Chris Donovan Trust

2013 Finalists of The Redemption & Justice Awards 

 No Offence

Chris Donavan Trust

2012 Winners of Most Inspirational Person Award 

Word4Weapons

2012 Winners of The Gold Star Restorative Justice Award

The Chris Donovan Trust

2010 Winners of Best Cycling Initiative for Young People Award

London Cycling Campaign

2004 Winners of The Social Entrepreneur Award

UnLtd

2001 Winners of The Viscount De L'Ise Award

Sir Winston Churchill Memorial Trust

2015 Winners of The Lighting the Fire Annual Excellence Awards

 LEAP Confronting Conflict

2013 Winners of Outstanding Contribution & Positive Role Model

Leaders In Community

2009 Winners of Best Grass Roots Community Organisation

Tower Hamlets Council

Consulting

Streets of Growth’s consultancy is a ‘non-profit’ social enterprise sharing the knowledge of our work and ‘hard earned’ frontline lessons, that you’d be hard pushed to find in any ‘How To Do’ books in this work. Sharing lessons from the street, our practitioner/consultants offer you and your organisation the space, guidance, time and confidentiality to review your current ways of operating, setting new visions and ambitions, and uncovering what practices and habits you and your team seek to challenge and change. We achieve this with our clients through taking you through every stage of Streets of Growth’s Appropriate Intervention Bridging Model™.

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Be assured – we don’t teach what we don’t know, and we don’t try and lead you where we ourselves don’t go. Our consulting offer is from tried, tested, proven, and continually re-developed hard-earned experience on the sharpest edge of young adult intervention work.

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For more information or a free 1-hour consulting offer discussion please contact us. All proceeds go direct into Streets of Growth’s transformative work with young communities, global research, and measurement proving impacts.